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«BV THE SAME .AUTHOR: 

SUNDAY OBSERVANCE AND SUNDAY LAW; 

together with Six Sermons on the Sabbath Question 
by the late George B. Bacon. 

THE SIMPLICITY THAT IS IN CHRIST : Sermons 
to the Woodland Church, Philadelphia. 

IN TREPANATION : 

ETHICS AND POLITICS : Papers pertaining to good 

morals and good government, including, among 

others : — 

The Defeat of Party Despotism by the rehabilitation 
of the Individual Citizen : an argument for Majority 
Elections. 

The Mistakes and Failures of the Temperance 
Reformation. 

License Legislation, especially in its application to 
Liquor-Selling. 

Prohibition, so-called. 

Polygamy in New England. 

Divorce-Reform. 

The Morality of Creed Subscription. 



IRKNICSffl POLEMICS 

with sundry 
Essays in Church History 



■ v / 

LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON 




ork : 
THE CHRISTIAN LITERATURE CO. 

1895 



*=> 






Copyright, 1895, &* 
THE CHRISTIAN LITERATURE CO. 



CONTENTS 



*#* The several papers comprised in this volume stand in the 
order in which they were published, or republished, in the "Chris- 
tian Literature " Magazine. In the following table, the titles ar« 
disposed in a more logical order : 



IRENICS AND POLEMICS 

Page 

The American Church and the Primitive Church . 225 
Five Theories of the Church .... 239 
The Restoration of the Protestant Episcopal 

Church to Catholic Fellowship . . 273 
How the Reverend Doctor Stone bettered his 

Situation 57 

ESSAYS IN CHURCH HISTORY 
The Real Prisoner of Chillon (1 496-1 570) . .109 
Concerning the Use of Fagots at Geneva (1553) 205 
Two Sides to a Saint (1 567-1 622) 1 

William Lloyd Garrison (1805- 1 879) . . 145 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT 



This historical essay, written at Geneva, was published 
in MacmiUari's Magazine, London, for September, 18T8, 
and has since been reissued as a pamphlet at Lausanne, 
Switzerland, with the consent both of author and of pub- 
lishers. 

On its first appearance, it was the subject of very se- 
rious attention in England and America, from critics of 
very different schools. The London Academy declared it 
to be " one of the most telling and vigorous pieces of his- 
torical criticism that we have met with for a long time,'" 
and concluded, " in a word, this article is one which the 
apologists of St. Francis and his ' sweetness ' will do well 
to answer. If they pass it by, the world may well be ex- 
cused for believing that it is unanswerable. " In like man- 
ner, the London Church Times, from the opposite point of 
view, representing the party that has been devoted to the 
cult of St. Francis, recognized the seriousness of the issue, 
and camoto the same conclusion, " unless Mr. Bacon's ar- 
ticle is answered, we shall have to give up St. Francis de 
Sales." 

Well, more than sixteen years have passed, and the 
article is still " unanswered because unanswerable ; " but 
we are still waiting for indications that this prostrate and 
discredited idol, so 

" Lopp'd, maim'd and battered on the grundsel edge," 
is any the less an object of veneration to its English 
votaries. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT.* 



The titles given below are far from rep- 
resenting all that has lately been published 
in England on the subject of St. Francis de 
Sales. The amount and character of this 
literature indicate a degree of reverent 
interest in that remarkable man almost 
amounting to a new cultus. The feeling is 
manifested, not only by the authors of these 
books (in whom something is to be par- 
doned to the enthusiasm of biography), but 
also by the readers and critics, that in the 
person of "the Apostle of the Chablais," 
we have a type of sanctified humanity quite 
superior to anything that can be expected 
from the English stock, and which mere 
Protestantism cannot attain unto. Now 

* St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Prince of Geneva. 
By the author of A Dominican Artist. Rivingtons, 1876. 

A Selection from the Spiritual Letters of St. Francis de 
Sales. Translated by the same author. Rivingtons, 
1871. 

Tlie Spirit of St Francis de Sales. By Jean Pierre 
Camus, Bishop of Belley. Translated by the same author. 
Rivingtons, 1872. 

The Mission of St. Francis of Sales in the Chablais.' By 
Lady Herbert. Bentley, 1868. 

Selections from the Letters of St. Francis de Sales. 
Translated from the French by Mrs. C W. Bagot. Re- 
vised by a Priest of the English Church. Masters, 1871 

The " Salesian " literature in French, always volumi- 
nous, has received unusual increments of late, in conse- 
quence of the project, just accomplished, for constituting 
St. Francis a " doctor of the Church.'" 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



there is nothing but good to be said of the 
naturalization of foreign saints, provided 
only it be done with discretion and fidelity 
to historic truth. But there is large scope 
here for the function of the avvocato del dia- 
volo ; and we are bound to say of all these 
books that they are wholly negligent of this 
duty. The Francis de Sales whom they 
present to us is neither the legendary Fran- 
cis nor the historical Francis. The blaze of 
color which characterizes the legend is toned 
down to suit the English taste, though no 
attempt is made to correct the drawing. 
2s ot even Lady Herbert's Mission in the 
Chablais ventures to reproduce that wild 
profusion of miracle, and those unctuous de- 
tails concerning the saint's resistance to 
temptation, in which his panegyrists so much 
delight. Not even the author of A Domin- 
ican Artist, in whose writings appear so 
many indications of industry and good 
taste, ventures on anything, with regard to 
the facts of her hero's life, but a servile 
though distant and timid following of the 
Eoman Catholic tradition. 

It is not necessary to go beyond Francis's 
own letters and the documents of his friends 
and partisans for the materials for correct- 
ing these distorted representations ; and it 
is not creditable to intelligent writers who 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



have had these materials under their eyes, 
to persist in repeating the old fiction as 
truth. A less labor-saving course would 
not only be more honorable to themselves, 
and more just to their readers, but it would 
not be in all respects disadvantageous to 
their hero. He would doubtless lose some 
rays of the halo that envelops him ; he 
might be constrained to descend a step or 
two from that lofty pedestal on which he 
seems sometimes to be consciously posing 
for a saint ; and certainly there would be 
some qualifying of that preternatural sweet- 
ness which (to the Protestant taste) ap- 
proaches now and then the very verge of 
mawkishness ; but whatever his portrait 
might lose in heroic dimensions and in the 
air of sanctity, not to say sanctimony, it 
would gain in human interest and probabil- 
ity. In the early pages of his biography, 
we should miss that solemn little prig de- 
scribed in the bull of canonization as having 
" shown when a child none of the traits of 
childhood, " and in the eulogy of Father 
Morel as ' ' having manifested in the cradle 
such chaste modesty as to shrink from the 
caresses of his nurse, and hardly permit her 
to kiss him ; "* and in the later chapters we 

* Canonisation de St. Frangois de Sales, en 16 discours. 
Grenoble, 1665. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



should part with more regret from the fig- 
ure of " the Apostle of theChablais/' taking 
his life in his hand and encountering the 
lofty mountains of the Chablais, its fright- 
ful precipices, its eternal winters, its fero- 
cious beasts and still more savage inhabi- 
tants, opposing the malignity and heresy of 
the latter only with the arms of love and 
meekness, and with the eloquent preaching 
of the true faith, until " at last his gentle- 
ness triumphed over their brutality, his love 
over their hate, his patience over their fury, 
his constancy to serve them over their ob- 
stinacy."* But we should get in exchange 
a most interesting and racy character, with 
a great deal of human nature in it, a genial 
bonhomie, a bright wit, a love of society, es- 
pecially that of cultivated ladies ; a taste 
and talent for diplomacy of the sort that ap- 
proaches intrigue ; and an unaffected ardor 
of mystical devotion combining and co-oper- 
ating with a practical shrewdness which 
made him a capital adviser of the pious but 
sentimental ladies who were his favorite 
correspondents, but which proved a danger- 
ous gift to a man who had been taught by 
one of the most eminent Jesuits f connected 

* See that tremendous piece of pulpit eloquence, the 
Oration of Bottini. Consistorial Advocate, at the canoni- 
zation of Francis, transcribed in full by Father Morel. 

t Father Possevin, author of the Soldat Chretien. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



with the affair of St. Bartholomew's Day, to 
make an unscrupulous use of it for the 
greater glory of God. 

It is no wonder that a mind constituted 
like that of Francis should give early evi- 
dence of a vocation to the ecclesiastical ca- 
reer. It is not difficult to believe the story 
told of him that when other children were 
playing soldiers, he would be playing church, 
and leading about the little peasants in a 
procession instead of a battalion ; nor that 
when he returned to his father's castle at 
Thorens in Savoy, from his costly education 
at Paris and Padua, an accomplished and 
brilliant young man of twenty-five, he should 
already have set before himself the position 
of Bishop and Prince of Geneva* as a more 
congenial one than any he would be likely 
to attain in the profession of arms, or in the 
career which his father's ambition had 
marked out for him, of country gentleman 
and senator of Savoy. 

The story of the disappointment of the 
father's plans is told by the most volumi- 
nous and authoritative of the saint's biog- 
raphers, the Abbe Marsollier, with a naivete 
characteristic of that class of writers. Soon 
after Francis' return home, his father an- 
nounced that he had arranged a marriage 

* So the Abbe Marsollier, Vie de St. Frangois, livre 1. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



for him with a charming young heiress in 
the neighborhood, daughter to the Baron 
de Vegy. " It struck the young count like 
a thunderbolt," says the biographer, who 
has been dwelling with delight on the early 
vows of celibacy which the young student 
had made in his private devotions ; and yet 
not so much like a thunderbolt after all, 
but that he was quite willing to ride over 
to castle Vegy and take a look at the young 
lady. In fact, a sense of respect for his 
father's wishes, or something, led him to 
call often on Mile, de Vegy, until her feel- 
ings, at least, had become very tenderly en- 
gaged. ' ' This young lady " (we quote from 
the biography of Loyau d'Amboise) "no 
longer concealed from him how dear he had 
become to her. She never looked on him 
without an indefinable smile that bespoke 
the feelings of her soul. Not more soft 
were Kachel's sighs for Jacob, not more ten- 
der the looks with which she greeted his 
return to the roof of Laban after charm- 
ing away the fatigues of the day with 
thoughts of her." To the great satisfac- 
tion of both families, the affair was looked 
upon as settled. Mutual congratulations 
were exchanged, and in the chateau de 
Sales they began to choose the place for the 
bride's portrait, and to talk about the ar- 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



rangements for the wedding party. But 
either the young count had changed his 
mind in the course of the wooing, or, as his 
biographers proudly assert, he never had had 
the slightest intention of marrying the girl 
at all. At all events, while this billing and 
cooing was going on, the young saint was 
in consultation with his cousin Louis, canon 
of the chapter of Geneva, to get him neatly 
out of the affair, which was managed by 
securing for him from the Pope the most 
brilliant ecclesiastical appointment in the 
diocese, that of provost of the cathedral, 
that had just fallen vacant. Not till the docu- 
ment that secured him this prize was fairly 
in his hand did Francis take any step that 
could compromise his hopeful relations with 
Mile, de Vegy. The disappointment, mortifi- 
cation and shame of his parents, when he 
came to them in company with his cousin, 
the canon, showing the brief of nomination, 
and announcing his intention to accept it, 
are described with exultation by his pane- 
gyrists. His mother, with her woman's 
heart, pleaded tenderly for the forsaken 
girl. " Think," she said, "of her distress 
when she finds that you have jilted her, 
and that she is repelled by the heart that 
should have been her refuge and her love. 
Bitter will be her tears, for she has given 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



you her heart without the slightest mis- 
trust." There was nothing to be alleged 
in answer to this appeal but his vow and 
his vocation, reinforced by certain miracu- 
lous indications of duty that were conclusive 
to his own conscience, but which, in the 
crude judgment of a man of the world, it 
would have been better to have forgotten 
altogether than to have recollected only at 
that stage of the affair. His mother, who 
seems to have a very clear view of the 
matter, merely answered: "This vow of 
yours was a very fine impulse; but you know 
just as well as I do that you could be re- 
leased from it by a single word of the Bishop 
of Geneva/'* 

This incident in the life of Francis has 
no adequate justice done to it in the English 
biographies; but by the Abbe Marsollier and 
by Loyau d'Amboise it is detailed as a heroic 
instance of sacrifice for conscience' sake. 
In reading it, however, one can hardly re- 
sist the thought how near the young saint 
might have been, at the time, to a prema- 
ture martyrdom to his principles ; that if 
Mile. deVegy had happened to have a big 
brother, the bodily sufferings of Francis for 

* See the Lives of the Samt by the two authors cited. 
The complacency with which they tell the story so as to 
show all the essential facts, and yet without a suspicion 
that there is anything- but heroism in their hero's course, 

is wonderful. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 9 

his devotion to the Church might have 
begun before he had so much as entered on 
his apostolic work among the fierce Protes- 
tants of the Chablais. 

It is no more than justice to the memory 
of the saint to say that this seems to have 
been the most serious of the indiscretions 
into which he fell in his relations with the 
fair sex. The excessive protestations, on 
the part of himself and his clerical eulo- 
gists, of a very exceptional virtue in this 
regard, and his too frequent occasions for 
hand-to-hand encounter with temptation, 
such as do not usually occur to honest gen- 
tlemen who keep temptation at a proper 
distance, suggest suspicions for which there 
is no corroboration. He was eminently a 
ladies' man, " for ever surrounded by 
women;"* and he was evidently disposed by 
nature to a sort of coquetry, against which 
he doubtless strove to guard himself. The 
mild terms of almost playful rebuke with 
which he answers letters of amorous adula- 
tion are in bad taste ; but bad taste is not al- 
ways sinful, whatever Mr. Kuskin may say. 
The bishop writes, for instance, in 1618, to 
one of these enthusiastic adorers: "Dear- 
est girl of my heart, I want to tell you that 
I have a child who writes to me that, being 

*SpiritofSt. Francis, III., 1, § 24, Ed. Rivingtons. 



10 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

separated from me has thrown her into dis- 
tress; that if she did not restrain her eyes 
they would shed tears over my departure, 
as the sky sheds rain, and other fine things of 
the sort. But she goes beyond this, and 
says that I am not a mere man, but some 
divinity sent on earth to compel us to love 
and admire him; and she even adds that she 
would use still stronger language if she 
dared. Now, my child, what do you think 
of that ? Isn't it very naughty to talk so ? 
Isn't it extravagant language ? "* etc. Let 
him that is without sin rebuke the genial, 
warm-hearted bachelor bishop for not drop- 
ping that sort of letter into the fire un- 
answered, or for not answering it sharply. 
Our censure, if we should venture upon any, 
would be reserved for the editor who, in 
culling from the voluminous masses of the 
saint's correspondence, materials for a Com- 
plete Religious Letter- writer for English 
clergymen and their fair parishioners, 
should, out of so much that is admirable, 
have selected this one. It is withal an in- 
justice to the character of Francis, who, in 
very trying circumstances, proved himself, 
we honestly think, as pure as the average of 
Protestant ministers — and that is high praise. 

* T.ettre a une dame, du 23 avril, 1618. P. 82 of the 
volume of Messrs. Rivingtons. Ed. Blaise, 418. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 11 

Of course no one will justify everything in 
his affair with Mme. de Ohantal. We will 
not deny that a miraculous revelation from 
heaven* may justify, in extreme cases, a 
fascinating clergyman of thirty-seven in cul- 
tivating a platonico religious intimacy with 
an extraordinarily beautiful widow of thirty- 
two. But no case could justify the parties 
in clandestine correspondence such as took 
place at the outset of this aquaintance. It 
was June 14, 1604, that Francis wrote to 
the Baroness de Chantal : " Since your 
father-director permits you to write me 
sometimes, I beg you will do so freely and 
heartily. It will be an act of charity. My 
present circumstances and occupation make 
me an object of compassion. To hear from 
persons like you refreshes me like dew. 
The length of this letter shows you how my 
mind relishes intercourse with yours, "f 
This letter was intended to be shown freely 
to her father and to her confessor, and con- 
tained expressions highly gratifying to their 
feelings. Ten days later it was followed by 
a strictly confidential letter, tending to sup- 
plant the influence of both these gentlemen 
by his own. " My last letter/' he says, 



* Francis himself makes no pretence of the heavenly 
vision. 
t Letter of June 14, 1604. No. 58. 



12 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

"will help you to quiet the mind of the 
good father to whom you ask leave to show 
it. I stuffed it well with things calculated 
to forestall any suspicion on his part that it 
was written with design;" and he goes on 
to urge her by the example of St. Teresa, 
not to limit her confidences to her confessor, 
but to accept him, Francis, in a more in- 
timate and spiritual relation.* We really 
believe that much good came of this friend- 
ship with Mme. Chantal, especially as the 
parties grew older; and that no serious harm 
came of it, beyond some temporary distress 
in the family of President Fremiot, a revolt- 
ing and fatal " marriage of convenience/' 
and a certain amount of duplicity, and of 
unwholesome excitement in both the bishop 
and the baroness growing out of their un- 
natural relation. The affair turned out 
much better than it began. If any docu- 
ment nearly as scandalous as the letter above 
quoted had been produced in a recent cause 
celebre in which the character of one of the 
most famous of modern preachers was at 
issue, it would have gone hard with him 
before the jury. We will not say more than 
that our saint was indiscreet; but it is im- 
possible to say less : and the disposition to 

* Letter 59. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 13 

dodges and intrigues illustrated by this in- 
cident throws a light on other portions of 
his history which it would not be honest to 
refuse to accept. 

The character in which Francis has had 
least justice done him by the publications 
commonly current is that of Missionary. 
His greatest achievement, the conversion of 
the Chablais, is related copiously and effu- 
sively by Lady Herbert and more briefly by 
the author of A Dominican Artist. But 
the substance of the story, as they tell it, 
may be condensed into a few words. Be- 
ing sent as a young man to destroy by his 
preaching the Protestant heresy that had 
become rooted in the province of the Chab- 
lais, he devoted himself to this task, in the 
face of excessive dangers and hardships, re- 
fusing military aid and protection, for the 
space of four years. The force of his argu- 
ments, the persuasiveness of his eloquence, 
the meekness and gentleness of his life, the 
sweetness of his disposition, his forgiving 
love towards his enemies, and the miracles 
that were wrought by him, overcame the 
bitter prejudices of the Protestants, who 
came to him in thousands to abjure their 
errors, until, by the influence of his minis- 
try, the whole population of the province 



14 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

was won to the Church, and heresy com- 
pletely extirpated.* 

Thus runs the story; but the biographies 
of the saint, even in the mitigated form in 
which they are delivered to the British 
public, enrich this outline with magnificent 
colors. We are led by them through a be- 
wildering haze of fictions and exaggerations. 
The project of canonizing Francis was en- 
tertained even before his death, and the 
work of procuring proofs of his sanctity was 
diligently begun by his influential family. 
The miracles of the saint are boldly com- 
pared to those of the Saviour of mankind, 
and under the one head of the raising of 
the dead are declared to be fully equal to 
those of the divine model, f But the won- 
ders wrought by Francis himself are far 
below those effected by the imagination of 
his eulogists. Not only do they multiply 
the population of the province tenfold, but 



* The most condensed summary of the fictitious legend 
of Francis de Sales is perhaps the Bull of Canonization, 
which may be found in the Appendix of the Life by Loyau 
d'Amboise. 

t The original Life of Francis, published by his nephew 
Auguste, about ten years after the apostle's death, con- 
cludes thus, with almost inconceivable bad taste : "It is 
that son and nephew that Francis loved that testifieth of 
these things, and he knoweth that his witness is true. 
And many other things did Francis de Sales, which are 
not written in this book, which, if they were written, I 
believe that the world would not contain them." But it 
is a notable fact that with the single exception of the 
casting out of devils, not one of these miracles is men- 
tioned or alluded to by Francis himself. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 15 

they change the face of nature and create 
new heavens and a new earth for the scene 
of their hero's exploits. The charming 
plain on the southern shore of Lake Leman, 
fenced from harsh winds by magnificent 
walls of mountain, where fig trees grow in 
the open gardens, and the gravest of the 
winter hardships is the rarity of a week's 
skating, becomes an awful wilderness in 
which " eternal winter " reigns, such as 
Salvator Rosa loved to paint. The quiet, 
good-humored peasants are transformed into 
fierce assassins, ambushed in every hedge ; 
and the stalwart young apostle, " one of the 
best built men of his time," flush of money 
and resources of every kind, backed by the 
treasury and army of Savoy, and perhaps 
the best protected man in Europe, is 
changed into a suffering martyr, confront- 
ing daily deaths with heroic resignation, 
and answering the warnings and entreatu s 
of his friends with a calm, patient smile. 
Everything becomes heroic. For better 
security, he takes his lodging at the castle 
of Allinges, on a pretty knoll of rock com- 
manding a delicious landscape, where he is 
the petted guest of the commandant; and we 
are invited to admire the fortitude of this 
stout, active young fellow of twenty-seven 
in that he actually takes the hour's walk 



16 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

into town on foot. * He has chilblains, and we 
hear (in the panegyrics) the gurgling of the 
blood as it gushes through his stockings and 
gaiters and stains his footprints in the snow. 
A bridge being broken, he crosses the 
stream on a plank; and his biographers 
roll their pious eyes and lift up adoring 
hands in admiration of the miracle. Later 
in his career, when as bishop he visits the 
valleys of Chamounix and Sixt, his admirers 
will not be content unless we join in their 
wonder at the sublime courage and self- 
denial with which he adventures himself in 
those dreadful places whither it is the de- 
light of tourists from all the lands of the 
earth to follow him.f 

When Francis de Sales entered on his 
mission in the Chablais, in September, 1594, 
that region had been Protestant for fifty- 
eight years. Thirty years before, in 1564, 
it had been receded to Savoy by the Bernese, 
in the treaty of ^Nyon, with the stipulation 
that the exercise of the Protestant religion 



* In the Life by Loyau cTAmboise, the one league 
stretches to three " that the fatigue maj r touch hard 
hearts," p. 70, 72. 

t Francis was a lover of natural beauty (see Sainte 
Beuve, Port Royal, I, 218) and fully capable of enjoying 
the magnificent scenery of his diocese. Mr. Gaberel, the 
venerable historian of Geneva, makes the curious remark 
in his work on Rousseau et les Genevois, that the earliest 
mention to be found in extant literature of the natural 
beauties of the region of the Leman is in Auguste de 
Sales' life of his uncle. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 17 

therein should not only not be molested, but 
should be protected and maintained by the 
Catholic sovereign — a stipulation allowed 
for the express reason that the people of the 
ceded province were so heartily attached to 
their faith that it would be impossible to 
detach them from it without great violence. 
Under this treaty the Ohablais abode in 
peace and prosperity for sixteen years, until 
the death of the just and liberal-minded 
Duke who made the treaty, and the acces- 
sion of his son, Charles Emmanuel, a prince 
the depth of whose religious convictions is 
indicated by his declaration that he held it 
to be " the duty of a good Christian to fight 
the Genevese, all pledges and oaths to the 
contrary notwithstanding." His deed was 
as good as his word. Plots of treachery and 
secret violence against the heretic city suc- 
ceeded each other so frequently that at last 
the magistrates decided that a state of open 
war was better than such a peace ; and in 
1589 war was declared by the little town 
against its powerful and warlike neighbor — 
a war that horribly devastated the entire 
neighborhood, and drained Geneva of blood 
and treasure, but left it covered with glory 
and strong in religious faith. In the course 
of this war, Thonon, the capital of the 
Chablais, being attacked by the Genevese 



18 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

with their Swiss and French allies, sur- 
rendered, doubtless with small regret on the 
part of its Protestant population. When, 
at the beginning of an unstable peace, in 
1694, the treaty of Nyon was reaffirmed, the 
Duke did not forget the coldness of the 
people of Thonon in the war against their 
fellow-believers, and had not long to wait 
for an opportunity of revenge. 

That very year the Duke resolved to con- 
vert the Ohablais. The time was well 
chosen. The people had suffered miserably 
in the war, and had little heart to resist 
injustice; the Protestant pastors had been 
harried out of the country, and only three 
or four of them allowed to return; public 
worship had ceased in most of the villages, 
and the children were growing up without 
instruction; little heroic Geneva crouched 
behind her walls, panting in utter exhaus- 
tion ; and what was more to the purpose, 
Berne, the other party to the treaty of 
Nyon, that had the right, under its terms, 
to insist on the maintenance of the stipula- 
tion in favor of the Protestant religion, had 
shown very plainly that she had no more 
stomach for fighting on account of others, so 
that there was little danger of any hindrance 
growing out of that document, unless it 
were, peradventure, some scruple of honor 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 19 

on the Duke's part, or some diplomatic re- 
monstrance from Berne. 

Accordingly the Duke sent a letter to the 
old Bishop of Geneva, at Annecy, asking 
him to send missionaries into the Chablais, 
and promising to aid them in their work 
with the whole force of his authority, to 
give them commissions accrediting them as 
employed in the ducal service, and to charge 
all commandants of posts to help the work 
to the utmost of their power. Perhaps the 
history of Christian missions has never 
offered an opening with so many attractions 
to an enterprising and devoted clergyman, 
and so few drawbacks, as that now presented 
to the brilliant and active young Provost of 
the chapter. Francis volunteered at once, 
and started for his mission- field without 
delay, accompanied by his cousin Louis, the 
canon. 

He had every imaginable advantage for 
success in his enterprise — young, handsome, 
ardent and enthusiastic, noble of birth, 
bold and persevering, sustained by family 
influence that gave him admission to all the 
best society of the province, peculiarly in- 
sinuating in the society of ladies, quick- 
witted, diplomatic and adroit, rarely losing 
his temper in controversy, but maintaining 
the imperturbable suavity of his manner 



20 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

even when his practical operations were of 
the severest and cruellest ; he was at the 
same time a man of strong convictions — 
strong, that is, with the strength that comes 
of an obstinate and conscientious resolution 
never to ponder an objection ; * of graceful 
though effeminate eloquence ; of intense 
mystical piety ; and what proved in the end 
to be of even greater importance to his 
undertaking — a versatile readiness in apply- 
ing means to ends without being em- 
barrassed by squeamish scruples of honor 
and conscience. Leaving out of considera- 
tion the alleged miracles by which his work 
was aided, it might almost be said that if a 
man so gifted and so favored should not be 
successful in a good cause, it would be itself 
a miracle as great as some of those ascribed 
to him in the act of canonization. 

Naturally, the mission organized under 
such auspices directed itself at once to the 
fortress of Allinges, the headquarters of 
the military governor of the province, from 
which, by means of a powerful garrison, he 
held in subjection not only the neighboring 
city of Thonon, but the whole of the 
harassed and wasted province. To him the 
missionaries presented their letters from the 

♦See, for a single instance, letter XI, p. 57. Ed. Riving- 
tons. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



Duke enjoining him to render them all the 
protection and support in his power. The 
governor was just the man for the occasion. 
A good Catholic, a zealous subject, a brave 
and cruel soldier, the Baron d'Hermance 
was also a family connection and an old 
personal friend of the Apostle. A plan of 
campaign was soon settled. They were to 
begin with the mildest measures, reserving 
the use of violence as a last resort.* This 
was a course both congenial to the feelings 
of Francis, and in accordance with the ideas 
of the Duke, who was not without fears lest 
his perfidy should provoke the Bernese to 
armed interference. The old soldier further 
advised the missionaries that it would be safer 
for them to spend their nights at the fort. 
The people of the Chablais, so he assured 
them, were a good-natured, simple, rude 
sort of folk, but very obstinate when they 
had made up their minds ; they had a very 
bad opinion of the Eoman Church, and 
were convinced that their liberties and 
privileges depended on their holding fast to 
their religion — a notion that proved to be 
not far from right. The next morning the 
mission was appropriately inaugurated by a 
review of the troops, and the governor, 



* Marsollier, livre II. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAJNT. 



pointing to his force of artillery, remarked 
significantly to Francis : ". If the Huguenots 
over there will give you a hearing, I hope 
we shall have no need to use these guns." * 
Advancing bravely from his fortified base, 
Francis presented himself to the magistrates 
of Thonon with letters commanding them 
to render all possible services to the mis- 
sionaries, and to attend upon their preach- 
ing, and warning them that any injury 
offered to the priests would be avenged on 
the whole city of Thonon. The impression 
thus made may have been salutary, but the 
mild and inoffensive ways of Francis gave 
little provocation to violence. The presence 
of two such commissioners as he and his 
cousin naturally provoked a temporary 
agitation in the town, which, however, soon 
subsided, and the mission went on quietly 
but diligently. He was free to use the great 
church of St. Hippolyte, and there, day by 
day, he gathered the little handful of about 
a dozen Catholics, mostly strangers, to hear 
him preach. It was natural to expect that 
the uncommon attractions of the man him- 
self, and the prodigious combination of in- 
fluences by which he was backed, would at 
least win now and then a straggling towns- 

* Thus the biographers generally ; but the quotation is 
mitigated by English editors. Or. Bull of Canonization. 
§15. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 23 

man or peasant to listen to the famous 
preacher. But it was not so. He bewails 
his disappointment in successive letters. 
"We had hoped that some would come to 
hear us, either out of curiosity or out of 
some lingering love for the old relig- 
ion. But they have all resolved, with 
mutual exhortations, not to do it. "* — 
"Their heart is hardened. They have 
said to God : We will not serve thee. They 
will not hear us, because they will not 
hear God." And yet the governor had been 
as good as his word, and used his personal 
persuasions to induce persons to hear the 
Apostle. But the result is summed up by 
Francis in these words: "I have been 
preaching at Thonon now seven months on 
every holiday, and often in the week besides. 
I have never been heard but by three or 
four of the Huguenots, and these only came 
four or five times except secretly." Having 
utterly failed in drawing the people to hear 
him, he went down among the people, and 
taking his stand in the public square on 
market-days, attempted to catch their atten- 
tion whether they would or no. This was 
equally in vain. The peasants were as ob- 

♦This and the following- citations are from his letters of 
this period. In one of them Francis alleges that a mu- 
nicipal law was made forbidding attendance on his ser- 
mons. But this is very unlikely. In the Ed. Blaise (Paris, 
1821) the letters may be found in chronological order. 



24 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



durate as the citizens. In the country 
villages they refused not only to hear him, 
but even to give him so much as a lodging 
on payment. At the end of a year's toil, 
wishing to draw together all the results of 
his mission, he announced far and wide that 
he would preach on St. Stephen's day in a 
church near the Allinges. The concourse 
consisted of seven persons. Up to this time 
Thonon had not furnished a single convert. 
The father of Francis wrote to him that all 
the wisest and most sensible people con- 
sidered his further persistence in the mission 
as a mere tempting of Providence, and that 
the only way to bring back such heretics to 
the faith was by the mouth of the can- 
non. 

Nevertheless, with admirable persistence, 
Francis resolved to keep at it for another 
year, concentrating all his efforts on the 
town of Thonon. Already he had made use 
of the press to circulate his doctrines in 
little tracts and broadsides. He now de- 
voted himself to discussions, private and 
public, and to the preparation of a book in 
exposition of Catholic doctrine. The aim of 
his teaching, both oral and printed, was 
characteristic of the man. It was concili- 
atory, dwelling on the points of resemblance 
between the two Churches, rather than on 



tWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 25 

the points of difference, and seeking to pro- 
duce the impression that the change from 
Protestant to Catholic, which would be at- 
tended by such vast worldly advantages, -was 
not so difficult a matter as some were dis- 
posed to think. It was charged against him 
by some of his own brethren that he was not 
honest in this matter ; and it is either very 
fortunate or very unfortunate for his reputa- 
tion as a Catholic saint and doctor, that the 
book that would have settled the question — 
the book above mentioned — should com- 
pletely and mysteriously have disappeared 
from the face of the earth.* 

Finding townsfolk and peasantry as stead- 
fast as ever in their faith, Francis turned 
to the provincial gentry. Helplessly de- 
pendent as these were on the duke's favor 
for promotion, whether in a military or in 
a civil career, it was not difficult to bring 
strong motives to bear upon them to per- 
suade them to give a hearing to the message 
of salvation. Among them, the Baron 
d'Avully, a man of great influence, was the 
husband of a zealous Catholic lady,' a de- 
voted admirer of Francis. Her "prayers 
and tears," combined with the arguments 
of the missionary, made a deep impression 

* This is all the more remarkable, since with the excep- 
tion of this important work, every scrap of Francis 1 writ- 
ing has been so religiously preserved. 



26 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

on this gentleman ; but before announcing 
his conversion he asked to hear a discussion 
of the points at issue. A meeting was ar- 
ranged between Francis and Pastor La Faye 
of Geneva, at which the discussion lasted 
three hours. The affair being reported only 
by friends of Francis, it is needless to say 
that the wretched Protestant was over- 
whelmed with argument at all points ; 
" frantic with rage, he broke out in a tor- 
rent of insulting language/' It is again un- 
fortunate that we have no report of the 
language used ; but the papers of a subse- 
quent discussion between the same parties 
are to be seen in the Library of Geneva, and 
afford us some ground of conjecture. To 
his antagonist's argument our saint meekly 
replies : " Your book is utterly worthless. 
It is packed with absurdities, lies, and blas- 
phemies. It is the work of a poor, arrogant, 
broken-winded minister, who has gone 
crazy with passion and rage ; a fool- 
hardy, blind, impudent impostor, a char- 
latan, a Proteus, a chameleon, an exces- 
sively ignorant ex-monk and ex-priest." 
In answer to these gentle words, the 
heretic bursts forth with his furious in- 
solence as follows : a Iam not a Proteus nor 
a chameleon ever since I have known God's 
truth I have steadfastly followed it. It is a 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



small matter to be judged of man's judg- 
ment. We must stand or fall to our own 
Master, to whom all our service is due. The 
Christian's fairest ornament is a humble 
mind. Let him that thinketh himself wise 
take heed lest he fall." If the above is an 
accurate report, it is truly painful to see how 
far the tender, gentle nature of the saint had 
changed places with such a rude creature as 
this Geneva pastor. * 

Besides d'Avully, there was converted a 
noted lawyer named Poncet. Of these ac- 
cessions the utmost was made. D'Avully was 
honored with a brief from the pope's own 
hand, couched in the most flattering terms, 
and assuring the neophyte of the distin- 
guished favors of the duke. But the hopes 
inspired by these two successes were disap- 
pointed. At the end of the second year's 
toil, the list of converts amounted to just 
twelve,f and the disgusted apostle declares 
to the duke : " Your Ohablais is a ruined 
province. Here have I been laboring twenty- 
seven months in this miserable country; but 
I have sown among thorns or in stony places. 

*The citations are from Gaberel, Hist, de VEglisede 
Geneve, II., 596. But the later editions of Francis' works 
are expurgated of insulting words and adapted to the 
modern taste. Ibid. 642. 

+ The list of them is given in the original Life by 
Auguste de Sales; but according to the current biogra- 
phies the converts in Thonon alone were long before thit 
to be counted by hundreds. See, for example, Loyau 
d'Amboise, p. 88. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



Certainly, except M. d'Avully, and Poncet 
the lawyer, the rest of the converts are not 
much to talk of. I pray God for better luck ; 
and I am sure that your highness's piety will 
not permit all our efforts to be in vain." * 

For many months it had been growing 
plain to Francis and his friends that meas- 
ures of a more vigorous sort must be used 
if anything was to be accomplished. This 
is the point of his appeal to the duke's piety. 
A year before, his friend President Favre had 
condoled with him on the inefficient sup- 
port he received from the authorities ; and 
the apostle himself had complained to 
the Jesuit Oanisius that " His Serene High- 
ness would not use violence to bring these 
people back into the Church, on account of 
the treaty on that point with Berne/' But 
on December 29, 1595, he applies to the 
duke to have President Favre sent with a 
commission to compel the citizens to attend 
his preaching. "This gentle violence," 
said he, "will I think constrain them to ac- 
cept the yoke of our holy zeal, and make a 
great breach in their obstinacy." f 

*Discours au Due de Savoie le 9 deceinbre 1596. CEuvres 
de St. Francis de Sales. Ed. Blaise, vol. XIV. Opuscules, 
p. 75. 

+ To this earlier period of the mission belong- the stories 
of attempted assassination from which the saint escapes, 
sometimes by miracle and sometimes by "sweetness, 1 ' 
but always magnificently scorning the protection of the 
secular afm. There is every reason to believe that they 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 29 

So absolute was the necessity, that, not- 
withstanding the unfavorable season, he 
crossed the Alps in November, 1596, for a 
personal interview with the duke at Turin. 
The new program for the conversion of the 
Ohablais which he submitted to the duke in 
council, is reported by Lady Herbert with 
great "sweetness" as consisting chiefly in 
" three things : the re-establishment of the 
mass at Thonon ; the restoration of the 
property belonging to the Church ; and the 
appointment of a certain number of priests 
and teachers, at fixed revenues throughout 
the province. He also urged the establish- 
ment of seminaries and schools ; the pro- 
hibition of heretical and atheistical publica- 
tions ; and the foundation of a House of 
Mercy at Thonon." * Some trifling matters 
besides are contained in the memorandum of 
Francis, which have escaped her ladyship's 



are all falsehoods. Francis never alludes to them. His 
parents at home did doubtless fidget about the safety of 
their favorite son. But a letter to him from his friend, 
President Favre, says : "My only trouble is that your 
good father worries so for fear some harm will come to 
you, that I can hardly persuade him that you are perfect- 
ly safe, and that, as I believe, there is not the slightest oc- 
casion to suspect danger for you. I comfort him all I can, 
often protesting (what I am sure you do not doubt) that 
I never would have left you if I could have perceived the 
slightest danger to be feared. 1 ' After Francis 1 death 
these assassination stories had a double value, as con- 
tributing to the materials of canonization, and as black- 
ening the character of the Protestants. 

* The Mission in the Chablais, p. 84, 



30 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

attention, but which we add as an illustra- 
tion of the saint's business-like ways : 

"The minister of Thonon to be sent away to 
some place where he can have no intercourse 
with his people. 

The heretic schoolmaster to be removed and 
a Catholic put in his place until the Jesuits can 
be settled. 

Liberalities to be shown towards some seven 
or eight old persons who have remained Cath- 
olic. 

Heretics, within a brief time, must be de- 
prived of all public offices, and Catholics ap- 
pointed into their places. 

Good promotion in the army for Catholic 
young men. 

One of the senators to summon all the citi- 
zens of Thonon to turn Catholic. 

All Protestant books to be burned. 

Your highness to show liberality to the new 
converts. 

It is necessary to scatter terror through the 
whole population by wholesome edicts."*- 

The Council shrank from a policy at once 

* See the copy of the original memorandum in Etudes 
biographiques sur St. Frangois, Chambery, 1860. This 
work, although published anonymously, is valuable and 
accurate. There is also a scholar -like and conscientious 
thesis by Pastor Guillot of the Geneva Church, entitled 
Francois de Sales et les Protestants, Geneve, 1873. The 
two chapters on Francis de Sales in M. Gaberel's Histoire 
deVEgliseie Geneve, vol. H, have been violently attacked 
in a pan hlet by the Abbs Fleury {magni nominis umbra), 
entitled St. Frangois de Sales, le P. Cherubin et les min- 
istres de Geneve, Paris, 1864. The writer clearly convicts 
his antagonist of some loose quotations, but leaves him 
safe in his main positions. These various documents will 
guide the student to the original sources of information. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. '61 

so audacious and so perfidious. But " with 
his usual sweetness " (as the Abbe Marsollier 
admiringly puts it) the ardent young saint 
represented that the other party to the 
treaty was in no condition to enforce his 
rights ; that the conversion was of great 
political importance ; that he would not 
recommend using violence at all ; but that 
' l if the Council thought they were going to 
re-establish Catholicism in the Chablais with 
only such means as had been used hitherto, 
they were very much mistaken." 

The Council were not convinced. Per- 
haps, indeed, the clergyman had failed to 
seethe point of their scruples. But the 
duke, whose conscience was not oyer nice, 
had been won to Francis' policy in advance. 
He cleared the Council Chamber with a sic 
volo, sic jubeo, and the saint returned to his 
spiritual labors in triumph. 

The first use which he made of his new 
powers must, we fear, be described as char- 
acteristic. Secretly, without communicating 
with the authorities of the town, he intro- 
duced workmen into the great church of St. 
Hippolyte, and commenced tearing down 
and building to transform the edifice into a 
Catholic church. This high-handed oper- 
ation, begun without any show of authority, 
naturally provoked an indignant tumult, 



'32 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

The magistrates of the town hastened to the 
church, and restrained the people from vio- 
lence ; then turning to Francis they re- 
minded him, with dignity, that under the 
treaty of Nyon theirs was a free city, and 
that such proceedings as his could not be 
undertaken but with their consent. Not 
until the affair had reached this point did 
Francis display his new orders from Turin to 
the eyes of the astounded and humiliated 
magistrates, with the threat that if they dared 
to interfere with them it would cost them 
the utter destruction of the town. It was, 
on the whole, not a pretty trick for an 
apostle to play ; but it was fairly successful. 
It failed, indeed, to provoke a riot ; but it 
succeeded in inflicting a public insult on the 
municipal authorities, and in "scattering 
terror " through the population. Francis 
wrote back to the duke with holy exultation : 
"The magistrates opposed me stoutly on 
the ground that it was a violation of the 
treaty of Nyon. I deny it ; but even if it 
were a violation of the treaty, I do not see 
that it is any of their business." 

But of what use was a church without a 
congregation ? In order that the Christmas 
high mass should not be said to empty 
walls, President Favre went from village to 
village in the neighborhood "scattering 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 



terror " with one hand and seductive 
promises with the other. Under the as- 
surance of being relieved from the crushing 
taxes, a number of the peasants were in- 
duced to attend the mass, and it was cele- 
brated on Christmas day in the presence of 
these, and of the twelve Catholics of Tho- 
non.* 

From this time forth, Francis was aided 
by a great force of Capuchin friars and of 
secular priests, who were supported by the 
salaries that had been pledged by treaty to 
the exiled Protestant pastors. But our 
Apostle had lost faith in such means of 
evangelization, and looked for something 
more effective. Of any ordinary force there 
was no lack already in the garrisons of the 
Allinges and other military posts, which 
were under his orders, and which held the 
wretched country in complete subjection, f 
But there was need of something to "scatter 
terror " ; and our saint knew of just the in- 
strument for the purpose, if only he could 

*Gaberel, II., 604, on the authority of a manuscript of 
the Capuchin friars who aided Francis. The manuscript 
is curious and of unquestionable authenticity : and I have 
taken pains to verify the citation. St. Genis (Histoire de 
la Savoie, II., 191) says that the mass was celebrated 
"before seven or eight old persons." This writer, show- 
ing- no sympathy with the reformed religion, is neverthe- 
less compelled to study the mission of Francis in its 
political and military aspects and comes to some very 
just conclusions. 

tSee Bull of Canonization, g 16. 



M TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

lay his hand upon it. The Martinengo 
regiment was a name that had only to 
be whispered in all that region to make 
the blood run cold with horror. It was a 
regiment of Spanish mercenaries that had 
been trained in the American wars to an ex- 
quisite delight and ingenuity in human 
torture. Seven years before, in the prov- 
inces neighboring the Chablais, it had been 
let loose like a ferocious beast by the Duke 
upon his own unarmed Protestant subjects, 
and day after day had revelled in ingenious 
torture, murder, and destruction. The 
simple proees-verbal containing the cata- 
logue of these atrocities is one of the most 
awful pages in history. "White-haired old 
men, the sick upon their beds, pregnant 
women, babies clinging to their mothers' 
breasts, were among the favorite objects of 
torture. To violate, to torture, to maim, to 
murder by slow degrees, were not enough ; 
the bodies of the murdered must be muti- 
lated and obscenely exposed. The village 
patriarchs were hung in their own chimneys 
to be slowly suffocated by the smoke. 
Others were dragged at the heels of horses, 
or roasted in burning barns, from which they 
were taken out gasping and thrown to die 
on dunghills, Meeting a young lad, the 
ruffians dislocated all his fingers, then filled 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 35 

his mouth with gunpowder and blew his 
head off. One of their commonest ways of 
inflicting a death of lingering anguish was 
of a sort that history refuses to describe. 
But the following incident of that brave 
campaign, from the proces-verbal, suffices 
to give an idea of the style of warfare of the 
Martinengo regiment : 

"The 13th of September, 1589, the Duke 
of Savoy having the day before entered the 
province of Gex, his troops, passing through 
Crozet, took the Eeverend Girard Barbier, 
minister of the Word of God at the said 
Crozet, aged about seventy-five years, split 
up the soles of his feet, and set him astride 
an ass, his face towards the tail, and led him 
thus, with every kind of insult, and beating 
him incessantly, to the Castle of Gex, and 
presented him to the said Duke, in whose 
presence he declared that he had preached 
nothing but the pure truth, and in the 
same would persevere until the end. And 
being brought away again, and thrown 
upon a little heap of straw in front of his 
house, he there died, all his goods having 
been pillaged."* 

Evidently the Martinengo regiment was 
exactly what Francis needed for his apostolic 

♦See the document in full in Gaberel, II., Appendix 235. 
It fills eight pages of small type with a mere catalogue of 
horrors. 



36 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

work. What he wanted was not soldiers, 
but those particular soldiers ; and we need 
not say that his application for the use of 
them was not made in vain to that religious 
prince whom they had entertained by their 
playful treatment of the aged pastor of 
Crozet. At the Apostle's request, this horde 
of devils were billeted on the towns and 
villages of the Chablais. " Great was the 
people's surprise," says good Marsollier, 
"when they beheld the arrival at Thonon, 
without previous notice, of the regiment of 
the Count of Martinengo, lieutenant-gener- 
al of the Duke's armies, who took lodgings 
in the town to await orders. The officers 
called in a body on Francis, and informed 
him that their orders were to do nothing 
except in co-operation with him." 

From this point, the work of conversion 
was simple, straightforward, and rapid. 
The new missionaries showed great devotion 
to their work of confiscation and banish- 
ment. The earliest objects of their evan- 
gelic zeal were the three or four remaining 
pastors. Louis Viret, the infirm pastor of 
Thonon, took refuge across the lake, in the 
canton de Vaud. His colleague, Jean Clerc, 
was obliged to make his escape from the 
ruffians in haste with his seven little chil- 
dren, with no other provision than a piece 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 37 

of fifteen sous. Pastor Perraudet of Bons, 
quietly returning from a visit to a sick man, 
was overtaken by a trooper, who split his 
skull with a sabre.* Such acts as this last, 
it is to be hoped, were rare. Not many 
such could be necessary, and the saint dis- 
liked needless violence. All schoolmasters 
and other offensive characters were driven 
into exile. 

Parallel with these persuasions were 
others of a kind more congenial to Francis' 
better nature. While obdurate Protestants 
were crushed with taxes, and saw their 
houses devoured, and their wives and 
daughters daily insulted by a billet of 
ruffianly troopers, the disinterested candor 
of those who showed themselves inclined to 
the new gospel was profusely rewarded by 
gifts, promotions, offices, festivities, and 
lavish hospitalities at the seats of the 
Catholic gentry. One noble house brought 
itself to the verge of ruin by its zealous 
liberality towards the new converts. A 
notable instance of the apostle's love to the 
household of faith was that of the minister 
Petit, made much of by all the saint's bi- 
ographers as "a distinguished Protestant 
clergyman." The epithet does him less 
than justice. A dozen years before, he had 

* Guillot, page 34. 



38 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

been refused admission to the Geneva 
parishes for his infamous character. Only 
two years before, the pastors of Gex, believ- 
ing him penitent, put him in charge of a 
village church ; but at the end of a year 
he was deposed from the ministry, aud after- 
wards lodged in gaol at Geneva, under ac- 
cusation of various felonies, and narrowly 
escaped the gallows. In short, he was nearly 
as well known as Martinengo's troopers. 
Nothing was more natural than that he 
should have a sincere disgust for Protestant- 
ism ; and Francis recognized without hesita- 
tion that he was just the man for his money, 
and had no scruple in writing to the Duke 
that this man could be had for a considera- 
tion. " This incomparable prince " promptly 
responded with an order on the treasury.* 

But our apostle's burning thirst for souls 
was not yet satisfied. He had the aid of the 
Capuchins, the dragoons, the nobility, and 
Petit; and legions of miraculous powers at- 
tended him. But nothing would content 
him but he must have the Duke in person. 
In the autumn of 1593 his repeated impor- 
tunities were fulfilled. In company with 
the cardinal-legate, De Medicis, the Duke 
approached the town of Thonon with vin- 
dictive feelings known to all, and restrained 

* Gaberel, II, 612. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 89 

only by the frail bridle of his solemn word 
and oath. The citizens and magistrates in 
terror entreated the intercession of Francis. 
It was a beautiful opportunity for the dis- 
play of " his habitual sweetness." He put 
himself, with the old bishop, at the head of 
the Protestant magistracy and consistory, 
marched out to meet the Duke, and threw 
himself at his feet, refusing to rise until 
the forgiveness of the citizens was granted.* 
This tableau is said to have resulted in a 
number of important conversions. But 
touching as it was, it did not delay the saint 
in getting to business. Some new articles 
were all ready which he wished to have added 
to his program of conversion. " The heretic 
schoolmasters had been banished; now, let 
no child be sent abroad to school. Let 
heretics be expelled from all public offices, 
not only in his highness' immediate service, 
but in subordinate grades. Let Pastor Viret 
be kept as far as possible from Thonon. 
Let all Catholics dwelling in that town be 
admitted to the bourgeoisie. Finally, let 
all exercise of the Protestant religion be ab- 
solutely prohibited." \ The Duke gave his 
consent, and under date of the 12 th of 



* Abbe de Baudry, Relation abregee des travaux de 
VApotre du Chablais, II. 

+ Gaberel, II., 625. 



40 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

October, patents were drawn by which 
judges, advocates, attorneys, notaries, castel- 
lans, and other such functionaries were dis- 
missed; and all their acts, subsequent to 
that date, were declared null and void; in 
short, the guaranteed liberties of the Oha- 
blais were destroyed by the stroke of a pen.* 
Ambassadors from Berne arrived soon after, 
with a protest against the perfidy; and the 
Duke submitted the matter to his Council, 
which advised him in favor of maintaining 
at least the show of good faith by tolerating 
the presence of three pastors in the prov- 
ince. But Francis warned the Duke under 
peril of everlasting damnation against any 
such weak concession,! and had his way 
about it. 

The Duke was " amazed at the change 
that had passed over the people, and all the 
more so as no means had been used to bring 
them back to the Church but instruction 
and good example."' Still, something re- 
mained to be done. How could this be, 
when the reported conversions already ex- 
ceeded manifold the entire population of the 
country, is a materialist cavil easily disposed 
of in such an epoch of miracle. But for 

•*CEuvres de St. Francis, XIV., 91. 
j Life of Francis, by Augustus, 179. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 41 

the hardened recusants who still held out 
against the sweetness of Francis, severer 
measures were now prepared. 

One morning the gates of the town were 
occupied by soldiers of the Martinengo regi- 
ment. A double line of troops was posted 
in each of the principal streets, and the en- 
tire bourgeoisie of the town was summoned 
to present itself before the Duke in the 
great room of the Hotel de Ville. With a 
shudder, the citizens observed that every 
exit from the room was guarded by these 
Spanish butchers,* and that at the right 
hand of the bloodthirsty Duke sat his in- 
spiring genius in the person of the sweetly- 
smiling Francis de Sales. After a harangue 
addressed to the Protestants by a Capuchin 
friar, the Duke himself addressed them. 
He recalled the efforts that had been made 
for their conversion, not wholly without 
success. Those who had been converted 
would not fail of his royal favor. " But," 
said he, ' ' there arc those who are harder 
than the millstone; they love their wallow- 
ing in the mire; they prefer darkness to 
light. We detest them; and if they do not 
turn, they shall know what our disfavor 

* The Abbe Marsollier chuckles with delight at the ter- 
ror of the citizens who "believed that the Duke was 
about to proceed to the last extremities. 1 ' Vie. de St. 
Frangois, liv. III. 



42 TWO SIDES TO A SAIKT. 

means. Stand aside, wretched men ! Let 
those that wear the Cross of Savoy in their 
hearts, and wish to be of the same religion 
with their prince, stand here at my right 
hand, and those who persist in their ob- 
duracy pass to my left ! " 

There was a moment of silence, a move- 
ment in the terrified crowd, and several 
went over and took their places at the right. 
But a large number still remained at the 
left. " Then the blessed Francis, leaving 
the Duke's side, came down among these, 
and exhorted them in the sweetest manner, 
saying : l Are you not ashamed to act so ? 
Have you no eyes nor senses ? I warn you 
to look out for yourselves, for the Duke 
will show you no mercy.' Several were 
brought over by these sweet words. Then 
the Duke, turning toward the obstinate, 
cried : e Depart from me ! You are not 
fit to live. In three days begone from my 
territories ! ' The soldiers at once did their 
duty, and these wretched people went into 
exile toward Nyon or Geneva. There were 
among them gentlemen of good estate, and 
many of less importance. Then his high- 
ness put his patents into execution. The 
mass was re-established in all the churches, 
the offices taken away from the heretics, 
their books burned, and every one who 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 43 

would not accept the Roman religion was 
driven from the country." * 

The "coup d'etat of Thonon " was re- 
peated by the same actors in all the villages 
of the Chablais. A later edict allowed six 
months for remaining heretics to choose be- 
tween conversion and exile; and with this we 
may say that " the Mission in the Chablais " 
was concluded. Of course for long years to 
come, the like measures had to be renewed 
in order to prevent and punish relapse. 
Caresses and corruption diminished, indeed, 
but cruelty did not cease, and of all the pro- 
tracted series of confiscations, banishments, 
and harryings, this smiling and seraphic 
creature, over whose inconceivable meekness 
and gentleness such libations of gushing 
eulogy are poured out by the British press, 
was the instigator, the director, and some- 
times in his own person the executioner, f 

* From the original Life of St. Francis by his nephew, 
quoted by M. Gaberel, II., '633. This work is the basis 
of all the subsequent biographies. The incautious naivete 
of his statements is often modified by later authors, with 
a view to edification. 

t On one occasion, some years after the coup d'etat, 
two of the " converted " parishes were visited by minis- 
ters from Geneva. ''Francis, indignant at this temerity, 
hastened to the fortress of Allinges for an armed force, 
since treaties and plighted word availed nothing." [He 
never appears to so much advantage as when he is vin- 
dicating the faith of treaties.] "He obtained a detach- 
ment of sold'ers, and thought right (since it concerned 
the cause of God) to put himself at their head, and drove 
out by physical force those whom he had often convinced 
by spiritual weapons. 1 ' The story is told by Fremin, a 
renegade Genevese, who became cure of Russin, in his 
mss. History of Geneva, in the Geneva Library, p. 510. 



44 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

The work accomplished is variously es- 
timated, according to the courage and im- 
agination of the biographer. Loyau d'Am- 
boise puts it at 20,000 converts. The 
Pope is very bold, and estimates Francis' 
total work of conversion at 70,000. Lady 
Herbert's discriminating pages give some 
elements for a conjecture, as by the 20,000 
who shared in the adoration at the Duke's 
visit to Thonon, and the 162,000 communi- 
cants (it is well to be accurate) present at 
the Thonon Jubilee, " which put the finish- 
ing stroke to the work of conversion in the 
Chablais." The total population of this 
province, at the beginning of the mission, 
carefully estimated from censuses taken be- 
fore and after, was less than 4000.* 

One little incident closely connected with 
the conversion of the Chablais, is too char- 
acteristic to be omitted. There was living 
at the time, in Geneva, at the age of nearly 
eighty years, a most venerable man, the 
latest survivor of the company of the re- 
formers, Theodore de Beza. The beauty 
and dignity of his old age charmed the great 
Casaubon, a few years later. " What a man 
he is ! " he exclaims ; " what piety ! What 

* The estimate is made by comparing the census of 
1558 with that of 1694, Gaberel, II., c68. The splendid 
figure of 162,000 is inclusive of pilgrims who were present 
in large numbers. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 45 

learning ! To hear him speak of sacred 
science, you could not believe him so ex- 
tremely old. His whole life, his whole talk, 
is of God." He too, like Francis, was of 
noble birth, accomplished education, admi- 
rable gifts, beautiful courtesy of manner, 
and high devotion to religious duty. After 
a dissipated youth, he had received, with a 
penitence which all his after life attested, 
the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, to the 
unfolding of which his manhood was de- 
voted. He left wealth and family behind 
him, gave up splendid benefices that were 
offered him in the Roman Church, and 
came to Geneva, where he became to Calvin 
what Melanchthon was to Luther. His 
whole life had been spent in stormy con- 
flicts, but its eventide was full of peace and 
honors. By personal character, as well as 
by his position as presiding pastor of the 
Geneva Church, he was the foremost man 
of the reformed communion. 

To Theodore de Beza, Francis de Sales 
was sent, during the unhopeful earlier 
months of his Chablais mission, with a com- 
mission from the Pope to labor for his con- 
version. Seeking private interviews with 
the venerable pastor, the enterprising young 
theologue plied him with arguments which 
(it is needless to say) were of small effect on 



46 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

the veteran colloquist of Poissy. Francis 
reported his ill-success to the Pope, and 
asked for further instructions. The in- 
structions came ; and this young gentleman 
was not ashamed to go back to the poor 
study in which the old man toiled at his 
daily work, with the offer, in the name of 
the Pope, of an annual pension of 4000 
gold crowns, and a gift of twice the value 
of all his personal property, as the price of 
his apostasy. It is Francis himself that tells 
the shameful story, and adds that, seeing 
that he was accomplishing nothing, he with- 
drew and returned to Thonon. A contem- 
porary manuscript, preserved at Geneva, 
adds that, at these insulting words, old 
Beza's gentle expression changed to stern- 
ness. He pointed to his empty book- shelves, 
whose precious contents had been sold to 
provide for the suffering refugees from 
France, and, opening the door for his guest, 
let him go with a vade retro, Satlianas.* 

* Nevertheless, the story that Beza was actually con- 
vinced and converted was studiously circulated at the 
time, and is repeated to this day in the Lives of Francis. 
On the grave authority of an after-dinner story told by a 
pot-companion of that chaste monarch, Henry IV., it is 
alleged that the cause which held this blameless old man 
to his principles was licentiousness! One may find the 
charge and the story gracefully reproduced by Lady 
Herbert, p. 97. The facts of the case, as any well- 
informed person might see, make the charge simply 
absurd. But it would be unjust to hold her ladyship to a 
rigid moral responsibility for lack of information. Beza 
was never under a vow of celibacy, so that there was not 
that to bind him even to the measure of self-denial exact- 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 47 

To get possession of Geneva, and to be 
enthroned there, not only as bishop, but as 
secular prince, was one of Francis' earliest 
and latest dreams.* To what lengths of 
wrong-doing he was impelled by it, will not 
be known until the secrets of all hearts are 
revealed. He is known to us almost ex- 
clusively by the mendacious panegyrics of 
his friends, and by his own copious but 
not, ordinarily, incautious correspondence. 
Neither in these nor in other documents do 
we find anything to convict him of actual 
conscious complicity with the atrocious 
crime of the Escalade of 1602. What might 
have been if the perfidious projects which 
the Duke was continually nursing in his 
revengeful bosom had been rebuked instead 
of encouraged by his favorite clergyman, we 
can only guess. Perhaps it would have 
made no difference in the course of that 
wretched prince whom our saint publicly 
extols for his piety and for all the Christian 

ed of the French ecclesiastic of the period. According 
to this story, he took refuge, for his vices, in the one cor- 
ner of the earth where they were sure to be austerely and 
rigorously punished ; and refused wealth and asylum in 
Italy where the state of society and law on this point was 
—what it was. It is interesting to read the Bull in which 
the Pope and two score Italian prelates put their virtuous 
hands to this disgraceful libel. 

* Francis clung fast to the title of prince as well as 
bishop, to the day of his death; and his will, the autograph 
of which is shown, with other relics, at the family seat 
at Thorens, gives instructions for his burial in his own 
cathedral at Geneva, in case the town should be recovered 
to the Catholic religion after his death. 



48 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

virtues, but whom, in a private conversa- 
tion with Mother Angelique,* he denounces 
in a whisper for his "dirty tricks," as 
"clever in men's eyes but in the eyes of God 
a reprobate." Perhaps it might not have 
changed the Duke's course; but it would 
have been better for the memory of the 
saint. 

The history of this prince's reign is 
stained on every page with plots to seize 
Geneva by perfidy, by purchased treachery, 
by ambuscade, by secret attack in times of 
plighted peace, under cover of assurances 
of his friendship ; so that it was not with 
guileless unsuspicion as to what might be 
the bearing of the question, that Francis 
once answered his sovereign's inquiry: 
"What should be done with Geneva?" — 
"There is no doubt that heresy would be 
weakened throughout Europe if this town, 
the very seat of Satan, could be reduced 
and subjugated." And he went on to indi- 
cate at length the things that made this 
little town of 15,000 souls the metropolis 
and radiating centre of the reformed faith. 

* Sainte Beuve {Port Royal, I., 257) quotes this discrep- 
ancy with admiration in proof of Francis' practical 
shrewdness and finesse. If it is right to speak of a saint 
as taking- pride in anything-, Francis was proud of his bluff, 
outspoken sincerity, "a l'ancienne gauloise."— " Je ne 
sais nullement Part de mentir, ni de dissimuler, ni de 
feindre avec dexterite — Ce que j'ai sur les levres, 
c'est justement ce qui sort de ma pensee,... je hals la 
duplicite comme la mort. 1 ' Marsollier, li v. VIII. , § 18. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 49 

Then, proposing certain spiritual methods, 
he added : "I know these remedies are 
small and slow, but is there anything else 
that could be done in this unhappy and 
degenerate age?" And then, in response 
to a word of encouragement from the Duke, 
he added slyly: "As to the destruction of 
the town, that is not exactly in my line nor 
to my taste. Your Highness has more ex- 
pedients for that than I could dream of.* 
He conceals many things, but does not hide 
his feelings towards the city — his city, as 
he calls it — "that den of thieves and out- 
laws." He writes to the Pope : " This 
town is to heretics and devils what Rome 
is to angels and Catholics. Every good 
Catholic, but most of all the Pope and the 
Catholic princes, ought to do his best to 
have this Babylon demolished or converted." 
Simultaneously with the preparations for 
the consecration of Francis as Bishop and 
Prince of Geneva, the Duke, stimulated by 
such talk as this from his spiritual adviser, 
carried on his secret preparations for that 
Escalade which, had it succeeded, would 
have anticipated, in the course of history, 
the horrors of the sack of Magdeburg by 
those of the sack of Geneva. It was plotted 

* Deuxieme discours au Due de Savoie. (GEuvres, XIV., 
76.) 



50 TWO SIDES TCfA SAINT. 

for the darkest night in the year, the 12th 
of December, o.s., 1602. About the end of 
November, Francis, returning thanks to 
the Chapter of his cathedral for their con- 
gratulations on his appointment, bade them: 
" Good-bye for the present, expecting soon 
to meet you again in your own city." * 
Thence he went into retreat to prepare for 
the solemnities of his consecration. His 
confessor, on this occasion, was that noted 
Scottish Jesuit, Father Alexander, who 
stood a few nights later at the foot of the 
scaling-ladders and shrived the ruffians, one 
by one, as they crept up the wall of Geneva 
to their work of midnight assassination. f 
How the cruel and perfidious plot was 
foiled, and how the Duke slunk back to 
Turin foaming with disappointed rage, is it 
not told with glee in every Genevese family 
the world over, as often as the 12th of De- 
cember comes round ? One of the exasper- 
ating sights that met the Duke's eye as he 
rode homeward through Annecy, was the 
long train of sump ter -mules sent by his or- 
ders from Turin, laden with church decora- 
tions and altar furniture and with eighty 
hundredweight of wax candles, to be used 

* Letter 42. 

t This fact has recently been developed by Mr. Th. 
Claparede in a paper read before the Archaeological Soci- 
ety of Geneva. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 51 

in the decoration and ill animation of St. 
Peter's at Geneva, when its prince-bishop 
should celebrate mass at Christmas in his 
own cathedral church. 

It is possible that for fear of displeasing 
the saint's "sweetness," these preparations 
had all been concealed from his too sensitive 
mind ; that he had no conjecture about the 
mysterious movement of troops through his 
diocese ; that his remark to his canons had 
no reference to anything in particular ; and 
that the new bishop, looking out of his win- 
dow at Annecy at the train from Turin, 
wondered in his heart where in the world 
all that church gear could be going to. We 
should wrong his blessed memory if we were 
to say that his guilt was demonstrated. But 
many a wretch has justly been hanged on 
less evidence of complicity in less atrocious 
crime. 

It is not needful to pursue further the 
course of the life of Francis de Sales. The 
traits manifest in his earlier life (though 
veiled in most of his recent biographies) are 
to be recognized in all his subsequent ca- 
reer.* It would be easy, if only the torrent 

* His labors in the Pays de G-ex were quite of the same 
character with those in the Chablais, except that, in- 
structed by his two years' experiment in the Chablais, he 
scattered no more of his rhetorical pearls before swine, 
but began at once with force. See Claparfede, Histoire 
des Eglises reformees du Pays de Gex : Brossard, Histoire 



52 TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 

of fulsome panegyric would assuage long 
enough to give the opportunity, to present 
his character in more pleasing aspects. 
There were noble and beautiful things in 
Francis. But one tires of seeing this adroit 
and courtier- like fanatic, with his duplicity 
and his cold-blooded cruelty, recommended 
in standing advertisements to the abused 
public as " a model of Christian saintliness 
and religious virtue for all time," as having 
lived " a life as sweet, pure, and noble as 
any man by divine help has been permitted 
to live upon earth;" and as having been 
"admirable for his freedom from bigotry in 
an age of persecution." Neither can we 
enter fully into sympathy with those to 
whom " it is a matter of entire thankfulness 
to find a distinctively Anglican writer set- 
ting forward " the ferocious and perfidious 
dragonnades by which he extinguished 
Christian light and liberty in the provinces 
south of Lake Leman, and smote that lovely 
region with a blight that lingers on it visibly 
until this day, "as a true missionary task to 
reclaim souls from deadly error, and bring 
them back to the truth." * That writer 

politique et reliaieuse du Pays de Gex : Bourg-en-Bresse, 
1851; Guillot, Fr de Sales et les Protestants : Geneve, 1873. 
The legendary story of the mission in Gex may be read in 
^.ny of the Lives of Francis. 

* The quotations are from " Opinions of the Press, 1 ' in 
Messrs. Rivingtons 1 Catalogue. 



TWO SIDES TO A SAINT. 53 

would render a good service, not only to 
history, but to practical religion, who should 
give the world a true picture of Francis de 
Sales, with all his singular graces and with 
his crying faults ; and so supersede the 
myriads of impossible fancy- portraits with 
nimbus and wings, with eyes rolling in mys- 
tical rapture, and with the everlasting smirk 
of " sweetness " and gentleness. 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE BET- 
TERED HIS SITUATION 



HOW THE 

REV. DR. STONE BETTERED 

HIS SITUATION. 



The following argument, not less timely 
now than when it was first called forth by 
the publication of Dr. Stone's book, treats 
of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church 
from a neglected point of view, but a point 
which commands a much wider and juster 
view of the Roman system than the point 
commonly occupied by Protestant contro- 
versialists. 

For many generations it has been a 
standing accusation against the Roman 
Catholic Church that it has a tendency to 
demoralize society and the individual by 
issuing certificates, written or oral, of the 
forgiveness of sins, and of the remission of 
the penalties of them, both in this world 
and the world to come, on the performance 
of rites, or the payment of money, or on 
other conditions different from those re- 
quired in the gospel — repentance and faith. 

In answer to this accusation, the apolo- 
gists of the Roman Church have constantly 



58 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

averred, sometimes with a great show of in- 
dignation, that these certificates of forgive- 
ness of sin and remission of penalty and as- 
surance of salvation do not mean, and are 
well understood not to mean, what their 
terms import; that the understanding is 
distinct and explicit between the Church 
and its devotees, that when the priest says, 
" I absolve thee," he does not in fact ab- 
solve at all, and that the forgiveness of the 
" penitent," to whom these words have been 
pronounced in the confessional, is just as 
entirely contingent on his true repentance 
as the forgiveness of any sinner outside of 
the Church can be; that the promise given 
in an "indulgence'*' of the remission of 
purgatorial torment, notwithstanding it may 
be absolute in form, is really subject to sim- 
ilar conditions : and that the grace to be 
conferred, ex ojjere operato, by the sacraments 
generally, is in like manner dependent on 
such and so many contingencies, as to pre- 
clude the danger that any person will be 
tempted into sin by assurance of safety; that, 
if at any time, impenitent persons have 
been induced by the agents of the Church 
to purchase indulgences promising to remit 
the penalties of their sins, these promises, 
given by her agents in her name, are indig- 
nantly disavowed and repudiated by the 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 51) 

Church — although there is no recorded 
instance of the money being refunded. 

On the other hand, however, an opposite 
style of address is sometimes taken up by 
this Church and its advocates — a style of ad- 
dress calculated to assure those who have 
thought themselves shut up to the gospel 
promises of forgiveness on condition of re- 
pentance and faith — that there is something 
a great deal more certain and assured to be 
had in the Church of Rome; that her clergy 
have a peculiar power of binding and loos- 
ing, which other clergymen do not possess; 
that there is a gracious virtue in her sacra- 
ments, which cannot be found in others; 
that her pope, especially, has control over 
the keys of the kingdom of heaven. There 
is much in the tone of her teachings, in the 
language of her sacraments, and in the 
terms of her indulgences and other docu- 
ments that corresponds with these preten- 
sions. They are summed up in the persuasive 
language of Pope Pius IX., in his letter of 
September 13, 1868, addressed to Protes- 
tant Christians, in which he implores them 
to "rescue themselves from a state in which 
they cannot be assured of their own salva- 
tion," and come into his fold, where, as he 
implies, they can be assured of it. 

These two " Phases of Catholicity," con- 



60 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

tradictory as they are, do, nevertheless, be- 
long to the same system. And many a 
luckless polemic, reasoning from one set of 
the utterances of the Church of Eome, has 
been suddenly overwhelmed with the Virtu- 
ous Indignation and Injured Innocence with 
which his antagonists have confronted him 
with the other set of utterances, crying out 
upon him, '" Is it Honest to say thus and so, 
when here are passages in our books or facts 
in our American practice which say just the 
contrary ? " 

If the Church of Eome could be driven 
up to choose between its two contradictory 
doctrines, the remaining controversy would 
be a short one. But this is hopeless. It 
clings inexpugnably to the fence, ready to 
drop on either side for the time, as the 
exigencies of controversy may require. It 
moves to and fro in its double-corner on the 
checker-board, and challenges defeat. 

In the representations which I have oc- 
casion to make, of the Roman Catholic 
theology, I shall draw from the most 
trustworthy sources, giving full references 
in the margin. And I do not despair, in 
the more Christian temper which we thank- 
fully recognize, in recent years, as governing 
both sides of the controversy, of finding that 
candid scholars on the opposite side acknowl- 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 61 

edge that I have written with at least honest 
and sincere intention, and that, albeit under 
a gently satiric form, I hare a sober argu- 
ment to submit which is worthy of a serious 
answer — if indeed there is any answer to be 
made. 

One word more before coming to the ar- 
gument. I wish to disclaim any personal 
disrespect for the gentleman whose name is 
used in the title of this article, and whose 
book is the text of the discussion. His 
theological position is demonstrably prepos- 
terous ; but there is nothing else about him 
that is not worthy of all respect. 

Dr. Stone's book, "The Invitation Heed- 
ed,"* was written in explanation and vin- 
dication of his sudden going over from the 
Protestant Episcopal to the Roman Catholic 
Church, just before the Vatican Council. 
Without criticising it in detail, we propose 
rapidly to state the upshot of the Rev. Dr. 
Stone's religious change, as it appears to us, 
and to foot up the balance of spiritual ad- 
vantage which he seems to have gained 
by it. 

In October, of 1868, the Rev. James 
Kent Stone, D.D., a minister of excellent 

* The Invitation Heeded : Reasons for a Return to 
Catholic Unity. By James Kent Stone, late President of 
Kenyon College, Gambier; and of Hobart College, Geneva, 
New York; and S.T.D. Catholic Publication Society. 
1870. 12mo, pp. 341. 



02 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

standing in the Protestant Episcopal Church, 
received, in common with the rest of us, a 
copy of a letter from the pope of Rome, 
in which he was affectionately invited to 
"rescue himself from a state in which he 
could not be assured of his own salvation," 
by becoming a member of the Roman 
Catholic Church, which teaches, by the way, 
that as soon as a man becomes ' ' assured 
of his own salvation "it is a dead certainty 
that he will be damned.* 

Accordingly, the Rev. Dr. Stone, deeply 
conscious how uncertain and perilous is 
the position of those who merely com- 
mit themselves in well doing, with sim- 
plicity and sincerity, to the keeping of the 
Lord Jesus Christ according to his promises, 
"hastens to rescue himself from that state, 
in which he cannot be assured of his own 
salvation," and betters himself wonderfully 
as follows : 

1. His first step is to make sure of his re- 
generation and entrance into the true church 
by the door of the church, which is, accord- 
ing to his new teachers, not Christ, but 
baptism. f To be sure he has once been 
baptized, and the Council of Trent warns 
him not to dare affirm that baptism admin- 

* Act. Cone. Trid., Sess. VI., Cap. IX., XII., XIII. 
f Concil. Florent., " vitas spiritualis janua." 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 63 

istered by a heretic (like his good old father) 
is not true baptism.* But as all his ever- 
lasting interests are now pending on a 
question which no mortal can answer, 
to wit, whether at the time of the bap- 
tism of little James, being then of 
tender age, the interior intention of old 
Doctor Stone corresponded with a certain 
doubtful and variously interpreted require- 
ment of the Council, of Trent — that he 
should " intend to do what the Church 
does"f — ^ is we ^ to make his " assurance 
of salvation " doubly sure, by a "hypothet- 
ical baptism " from the hands of a Eoman 
Catholic priest, with some accompaniments 
which although " not of absolute necessity to 
his salvation, are of great importance" — 
such as a little salt in his mouth to excite 
"a relish for good works/' a little of the 
priest's spittle smeared upon his ears and 
nostrils to u open him into an odor of 
sweetness," a little of the essential " oil of 
catechumens " on his breast and between 
his shoulders, and of the "oil of chrism " 
on the crown of his head, with a "white 
garment " on, outside of his coat and pan- 
taloons, and a lighted candle in his hand in 
the daytime. J; If there is a way of meriting 

* Concil. Trid., Canon 4, De Bapt. 
t Concil. Trid., Sess. VII., Can. 11. 
X See the Roman Catechism. 



64 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

heaven by a process of mortification, we 
have little doubt that it must be for a re- 
spectable middle-aged gentleman who has 
learned, by being president of two colleges, 
the importance of preserving his personal 
dignity, to be operated upon in just this 
way. Nothing, we should imagine, could 
add to the poignancy of his distress, and 
consequent merit, unless it should be to have 
the members of the sophomore class present 
while he was having his nose (i opened into 
the odor of sweetness." 

Doubtless the object to be gained is amply 
worth the sacrifice, since it is to " rescue 
oneself from that state in which he cannot 
be assured of his own salvation," and avoid 
that " eternal misery and everlasting destruc- 
tion," which, according to the authoritative 
catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, is 
the alternative of valid baptism. This 
second ceremony, be it remembered, is only 
a hypothetical one, calculated to hit him if 
he is unbaptized; but, in case it should ap- 
pear in the judgment of the last day that 
old Dr. Stone had intended to " do what the 
church does " (it being, at present, not infal- 
libly settled what such an intention is), then 
this latter and merely hypothetical ceremo- 
nials is to be held to have been no baptism at 
all, but nail and void to all intents and pur- 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 



poses whatsoever. But considering that the 
issues of eternity are pending on the insol- 
uble question as to the validity of the first 
baptism, considering that a defect here can 
never be supplied to all eternity, whether by 
years of fidelity in other sacraments, or by 
aBons of torture in purgatorial fire, since it 
is only by baptism that "the right of par- 
taking of the other sacraments is acquired,"* 
it is nothing more than common prudence 
to adopt a course that diminishes by at least 
one-half the chances of a fatal defect. It 
must be admitted that there still remains a 
possibility of the defect of intention in the 
second act as well as in the first ; such things 
having been known in ecclesiastical history 
as the purposed "withholding of the inten- 
tion " in multitudes of sacramental acts on 
the part of an unfaithful priest. Still, it 
may be held, perhaps, by the Rev. Dr. Stone, 
that the hypothetical transaction makes 
the matter nearly enough certain for all 
practical purposes (as the old arithmetics 
used to say), although it falls a good deal 
short of that " assurance of his own salva- 
tion " to which he was invited in the pope's 
letter. f 

But presuming that between his two bap • 

* Dens, De Bapt. Tractat. 

t It is very pleasant, from time to time, as one trav- 
erses the dreary waste of " commandments contained in 
ordinances ,1 which make np the Romish system, to come 



HOW THE RET. DR. STONE 



tisms Dr. Stone is validly entered into tho 
Roman Catholic Church, may we not now 
congratulate him on the (hypothetical) as- 
surance of his own salvation ? Not quite yet . 
To be sure, he has received the remission of 
all his sins, up to that time, both original 
and actual, and the remission of the punish- 
ment of them, both temporal and eternal, 
and has been (as the Holy Father promised 
in his letter of September, 13G8, already 
quoted) "enriched with unexhausted treas- 
ures'' of divine grace.* But it is damnable 
heresy not to acknowledge that " he may lose 
the grace/' or to hold " that it is possible for 
him to avoid all sins — unless by special priv- 
ilege from God, such as the church holds to 

upon some admission or proviso which, fairly interpreted, 
nullifies all the rest. The Council of Trent, for instance, 
declares that " without the washing' of regeneration 
(meaning- baptism), or the desire of it, there can be no 
justification," and teaches that an unbeliever brought to 
embrace Christianity, not having the opportunity of bap- 
tism but yet desiring to receive it, is" baptized in desire" 
—the desire supplying the place of the actual sacrament. 
(See Concil. Trident, Sess. VI., Can. 4; Sess. VII., Can. 4. 
Also Bishop's Hay's "Sincere Christian," vol.1, chap. xx.). 
It is obvious enough that the just interpretation and ap- 
plication of these very Christian teachings would blow 
the "doctrine of intention" and of the "opus operatum" 
to pieces. But the thorough-going Romanizers scorn to 
take advantage of such weak concessions. Cardinal 
Pallavicini says decidedly, "There is nothing repugnant 
in the idea that no person in particular, after all possible 
researches, can come to be perfectly sure of his baptism. 
Nobody can complain that he suffers this evil without 
having deserved it. God, by a goodness purely arbitrary, 
delivers the one without delivering the other." (Quoted 
in Bungener's " History of the Council of Trent," p. 159.) 
This line of argument will be of no small comfort to Dr. 
Stone in his disappointment about the " assurance of his 
own salvation." 
* Catech. Roman., 152-169. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 67 

have been granted to the Blessed Virgin.''* 
Grace may come and go, but orthodoxy 
agrees with experience in teaching that 
" concupiscence, which is the fuel of sin, re- 
mains. "\ It is damnable, therefore, to 
affirm that the rest of the seven sacraments 
are not necessary to Dr. Stone's salvation ; % 
and especially to offirm that " it is possible 
for him if he shall fall " (as he inevitably 
will) "after baptism, to recover his lost 
righteousness without the sacrament of pen- 
ance,'^ which is " rightly called a second 
plank after shipwreck; r || and equally dam- 
nable to "deny that sacramental confession 
is necessary to salvation ; "^ or to "affirm 
that in order to receive remission of sins in 
the sacrament of penance it is not necessary, 
jure divino, for him to confess all and every 
mortal sin which occurs to his memory after 
due and diligent premeditation — even his 
secret sins."** 

We find, therefore, that our estimable 
friend is very, very far indeed, up to this 
point, from having got what he went for. 
He thought he was stepping upon some- 
thing solid, but finds himself all at once in 

* Concil. Trident., Sets, vi., Can. 22. 
t Catech. Roman., ubi supra. 
% Concil. Trident., Sess. vii., Can. 4. 
§ Ibid., Sess. vi., Can. 29, De Justif. 
|| Ibid., Sess. xiv., Can. 2. 
i Ibid., Sess. xiv., Can. 6. 
** Ibid., Sess. xiv., Can. 7. 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



great waters, and making a clutch at the 
"second plank after shipwreck." 

A certain embarrassment attends him at 
his first approach to the sacrament of pen- 
ance. He has a distinct understanding with 
the church that all sins incurred before bap- 
tism, both original sina and actual sins, and 
all the punishment of them, both eternal 
punishment in hell and temporal punish- 
ment in this world or in purgatory, are ab- 
solutely and entirely remitted in that sacra- 
ment, and that no confession or penance is 
due on their account.* 

But now the painful question arises, 
When was he baptized ? He may well 
hope that the transaction of his good 
old heretic of a father and of his spon- 
sors in baptism, when they called him 
M. or N., was only an idle ceremony ; for 
in that case the long score of his acts and 
deeds of heresy and schism all his life through 
is wiped out by the hypothetical baptism, 
and he may begin his confessions from a 
very recent date. But if his father had the 
right sort of intention, then this hypotheti- 
cal baptism is no baptism at all, and he is to 
begin at the beginning with his penance. 
Inasmuch as neither man nor angel can 
settle the question, he will act wisely to fol- 

* Catech. Roman., ubi supra. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 69 

low the safe example of St. Augustine, and 
begin his confessions with owning up frankly 
to the indiscretions (to use the mildest term), 
with which, in early infancy, he aggravated 
the temper of his nurse, and peradventure 
disturbed the serenity of his reverend parent. 
Doubtless it will make a long story, but 
what is that, when one is seeking for the 
" assurance of his own salvation ' ' ? And oh 
the joy — the calm, serene peace — when he 
shall hear at last from the lips of the duly 
accredited representative of the church the 
operative sacramental words, Ego absolvo te y 
and know at last, after all these forty or fifty 
years of painful uncertainty, that at least for 
this little moment he is in a state of for- 
giveness and peace with God. 

But softly ! We are on the very verge, 
before we think of it, of repeating that 
wicked calumny upon the Eoman Catholic 
Church against which Father Hecker so in- 
dignantly protests, saying : 

"Is it Honest to persist in saying that 
Catholics believe their sins are forgiven, 
merely by the confession of them to the 
priest, without a true sorrow for them, or a 
true purpose to quit them — when every 
child finds the contrary distinctly and clear- 
ly stated in the catechism which he is 



70 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

obliged to learn before lie is admitted to the 
sacraments ?"* 

Of course, it is not honest ! We have not 
examined the catechism in question, for the 
reason that if we were to quote it against 
the church of Rome we should be told that 
it was not authoritative, and be scornfully 
snubbed for pretending to refer to what was 
not one of their standards— but of course it 
is conclusive against our honesty when they 
quote it. To be sure, the priest says in so 
many words: " I absolve thee from thy sins, 
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost; " and Bishop Hay, 
in a volume commended by the proper au- 
thorities to the confidence of the faithful, 
declares that " Jesus Christ has passed his 
sacred word that when they (the priests) 
forgive a penitent's sins by pronouncing the 
sentence of absolution upon him, they are 
actually forgiven, "f But then nothing is 
better established than that these author- 
ized books of religious instruction may be 
repudiated at discretion as of no authority 
at all, whenever the exigency requires it. 
Then the Catechism of the Council of Trent 
says in terms : " Our sins are forgiven by 
the absolution of the priest;"! "theabsolu- 

* Tract of the Catholic Publication Society. 
+ Sincere Christian, Vol II., p. 69. 
J Catech. Roman, p. 239. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 



tion of the priest which is expressed in 
words, seals the remission of sins, which it 
accomplishes in the soul;"* "unlike the 
authority given to the priests of the old 
law, to declare the leper cleansed from his 
leprosy, the power with which the priests 
of the new law are invested is not simply to 
declare that sins are forgiven, but as min- 
isters of God, really to absolve from sin." \ 
Thus the Catechism of the Council of Trent; 
but bless your simple soul ! it is not the 
Catechism of the Council that is infallible, 
but only the Decrees of the Council ; and 
although these do, in their obvious mean- 
ing, seem to say the same thing, neverthe- 
less Dr. Stone will find, when he comes to 
search among them in hopes to " read 
his title clear " to divine forgiveness on the 
ground of having received absolution from 
the priest, that what they say is qualified by 
so many saving clauses, and modified by so 
many counter-statements, that the seeker 
for the assurance of his own salvation is as 
far as ever from being able to 

" bid farewell to every fear, 
And wipe his weeping eyes." 

Only one thing is absolutely certain ; and 
that is that it is impossible for him to be 

* Ibid., p. 240. 

f Ibid., see the various Canons of Sessions vi. and xiv., 
of the Council of Trent, above quoted. 



72 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

forgiven without absolution; but whether he 
is forgiven, or is going to be, now that he 
has received his absolution, does not by any 
means so distinctly appear. For "if he 
denies that in order to the entire and per- 
fect forgiveness of sins, three acts are re- 
quired in the penitent, to wit, Contrition, 
Confession, and Satisfaction, he is to be 
Anathema,"* which, if we understand 
it correctly, is quite another thing from 
being forgiven and assured of his salvation. 
Now Contrition, according to the same in- 
fallible authority, 'Ms the distress and 
horror of the mind on account of sin com- 
mitted, with the purpose to sin no more." 
" It includes not only the ceasing from sin, 
but the purpose and commencement of a 
new life and hatred of the old."f It is 
"produced by the scrutiny, summing up, 
and detestation of sins, with which one re- 
counts his past years in the bitterness of his 
soul, with pondering the weight, multitude, 
and baseness of his sins, the loss of eternal 
happiness, and the incurring of eternal 
damnation, together with the purpose of a 
better life." J Now it is important for Dr. 
Stone to understand (as doubtless he has 
been told by this time) that although this 

*Conc. Trid., Sess. xir. Can. 4. 
tlbid., Sess. xiv., Cap. 4 
tlbid., Sess. xiv., Can. 5. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 73 

will be of no avail to him without the abso- 
lution, or that at least the desire for the ab- 
solution,* nevertheless the absolution will 
be of none effect unless the contrition shall 
have been adequately performed. 

Furthermore, a second part of the sacra- 
ment is confession, and there is an awful 
margin of uncertainty about this act ; for it 
is damnable to deny that "it is necessary, 
jure divino, in order to forgiveness of sins, 
to confess all and every mortal sin which 
may be remembered after due and diligent 
premeditation."! But which of his sins are 
mortal and which venial, it is simply im- 
possible for the Rev. Dr. Stone to know by 
this time, for it is a life's labor to learn the 
distinctions between them from the theolo- 
gians, and when you have learned the dis- 
tinctions, you have no certainty about them, 
for they never have been infallibly defined, 
and the doctors disagree. It may be tedi- 
ous, but it is obviously necessary, in order 
to the assurance of his salvation, for the 
doctor to make a clean breast of all the 
sins, big and little, that he may remember 
"after due and diligent premeditation." 
But what degree of premeditation is " due " 
and "diligent" is painfully vague, consider- 

flbid., Sess xiv., Cap. 4. 
*Ibid., Sess. xiv., Can. 7. 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



ing how much is depending on it. It were 
well he should give his whole time and 
attention to it. But even then he would be 
unable to judge with exactness when it was 
accomplished. 

" Exactly so ! " doubtless the Rev. Dr. 
Stone would say: "and herein consists the 
happiness of us who have ( rescued ourselves 
from the state in which we could not be as- 
sured of our own salvation ' — that we have 
the advantage of a divinely authorized 
priest, with power of binding and loosing, 
who shall guard us from self-deception and 
mistake, and certify us with sacramental 
words that all these uncertain conditions are 
adequately fulfilled, and assure us, in so 
many words, that our sins are remitted. Oh, 
the comfort of this distinct assurance from 
the Church ! — this blessed sacrament of 
penance ! — this second plank after ship- 
wreck ! " 

Poor man ! He has learned by this time 
that his priest does not undertake to certify 
him of anything of the sort — that the abso- 
lution is pronounced on the presumption 
that his own part of the business has been 
fully attended to, but that if his contrition 
or his confession has been defective, that is 
his own look-out, and he must suffer the 
consequences, even be they everlasting per- 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 75 

dition. The absolution, in that case/ does 
not count at all.* 

"But," thinks the Rev. Dr. Stone, a 
little concerned about the assurance of 
his salvation, tft if all the issues of eternal 
life are to turn on a question of my own 
consciousness, of which no one is to judge 
but myself, I do not see how I am so 
much better off on the point of assurance 
than when I was a Protestant, and had 
the distinct, undoubted promise of the Lord 
Jesus Christ himself of salvation on condi- 
tion of repentance and faith." We feel for 
the honest man's disappointment, but can 
only recommend to him, in his present 
situation, to carry his trouble to his new 

* "As the Church may sometimes err with respect to 
persons, it may happen that such an one who shall have 
been loosed in the eyes of the Church, may be bound be- 
fore God, and that he whom the Church shall have bound 
may be loosed when he shall appear before Him who 
knoweth all things." Pope Innocent III., Epistle ii., 
quoted in Bungener's " History of the Council of Trent." 
We beg pardon for citing the language of a pope as an 
authority, since it is recognized on all hands that hardly 
anything is more unauthorized and fallible than the say- 
ings of a pope, excepting only on those occasions when 
he speaks ex cathedra— and precisely when that is, no 
mortal can tell with certainty. 

Let us try what a cardinal will say: " Without a deep 
and earnest grief, and a determination not to sin again, 
no absolution of the priest has the slightest worth or 
avail in the sight of God ; on the con trary, any one who 
asks or obtains absolution, without that sorrow, instead of 
thereby obtaining forgiveness of his sins, commits an 
enormous sacrilege, and adds to the weight of his guilt, 
and goes away from the feet of his confessor still more 
heavily laden than when he approached him." Wiseman 
on the Doctrines of the Church, vol. ii.. p. 10. 

There would seem to be nearly the same amount and 
quality of comfort for tender consciences, and " assur- 
ance of salvation " here, as maybe found (for example) 
in " Edwards on the Affections." 



^6 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

advisers. The best advice they can give 
him will perhaps be that which certain 
other high ecclesiastics, of unquestionable 
regularity of succession and validity of or- 
dination once gave to a distressed inquirer — 
"What -is that to us? see thou to that!" 

It begins to look extremely doubtful 
whether we shall be able to get the Eev. 
James Kent Stone to heaven at all, on this 
course, notwithstanding he has come so far 
out of his way to make absolutely sure of 
it. But supposing all these difficulties ob- 
viated, and that by a special revelation (it 
is impossible to conceive of any other means 
of coming at it) he discovers that his bap- 
tism and contrition and confession are all 
right, and furthermore that the priest has 
had the necessary " intention " in pronounc- 
ing the absolution, and supposing a number 
of other uncertainties incident to this way 
of salvation, but which we have no time to 
attend to, to be entirely obviated, how 
happy he must be, post tot discrimina 
tutus, assured of the forgiveness of all his 
sins, and how delightful the prospect set 
before him — 

" Sweet fields arrayed in living green. 
And rivers of delight ! " 

Alas, no ! If the Eev. Dr. Stone has any 
idea as this, it is only a remnant of the 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 77 

crude notions which he picked up in the 
days of his heresy, by the private interpre- 
tation of the Scriptures. Let him now un- 
derstand that it is damnable error to hold 
"that when God forgives sins he always re- 
mits the whole punishment of them."* The 
eternal punishment, indeed, is remitted ; but 
the temporal punishment which remains to 
be executed may reach so far into the world 
to come that it is impossible to predict the 
end of it. In fact, the characteristic vague- 
ness in which all the most important matters 
that pertain to one's salvation are studiously 
involved in the Eoman Catholic Church is 
remarkably illustrated in this matter of pur- 
gatorial torment. The nature of it is doubt- 
ful. The majority of theologians hold that 
it is effected by means of literal, material 
fire — but that is only "a pious opinion/' 
aud will not be known for certain until the 
next time the pope speaks "out of his 
chair." The degree of it is doubtful. St. 
Thomas Aquinas thinks that it exceeds any 
pain known in his life ; Bonaventura and 
Bellarmine guess that the greatest pains in 
purgatory are greater than the greatest in 
this world ; but they are inclined to think 
that the least of the pains is not greater 



*Concil. Trident., Sess. xiv., Can. 12. See also Sess. vi., 
Can. 30. 



78 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

than the greatest in this world.* But 
the duration of purgatorial torment is 
the most uncertain thing of all. Some 
think it will last only a little while ; 
others that it will endure for years and ages. 
The Church either don't know, or won't tell. 
The most distinctly settled thing about the 
whole business seems to be this : that no one 
was ever yet known to be delivered from pur- 
gatory so long as there was any more money 
to be got out of his family by keeping him 
in. 

Is it not, now, rather a rough disappoint- 
ment to a man who has done so much, and 
travelled so far, on the promise of a clear and 
" assured " view of his future happiness, to 
bring him through all those perils to the top 
of his Mount Pisgah, and bid him look off 
on a — lake of fire and brimstone ? We put 
it to the pope, in behalf of our deceived and 
injured fellow-citizen— is it the fair thing ? 

Well, after all, ten thousand years of pur- 
gatory, more or less, will not so much mat- 
ter to our friend, so long as he is "assured 
of his own salvation" from eternal perdition. 
Ay; there's the rub. He is not assured. 
Supposing it is all right thus far, with his 
baptism and confirmation and penance 
(and we have not stated a half of the diffi- 

* Dens, De Purgatorio. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 79 

culties of this supposition), he is now indeed 
in a state of grace, and all his sins are for- 
given, albeit part of the punishment of them 
is liable still to be inflicted in purgatory. If 
he dies now, happy man ! for (always suppos- 
ing as above) he is sure of being saved, sooner 
or later. But he has no certainty of remain- 
ing in this state of grace for an hour. And the 
Church (kind mother !) has provided for the 
security of her children by other sacraments, 
notably the sacrament of the Eucharist. Dr. 
Stone has undoubtedly, in his heretic days, 
read the sixth chapter of John, with the 
query, What if the Roman interpretation of 
these promises is the true one, and in order 
to have eternal life, I am required to eat the 
flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, 
literally, in the transubstantiated bread 
and wine ; and he now recalls the Lord's 
promise, " if any man eat of this bread he 
shall live forever ? "* — and he finds no small 
comfort in it. It is not pleasant to discover, 
indeed, that the Church, even granting the 
interpretation of the passage, declares it of 
none effect, giving it to be understood that 
thousands upon thousands have eaten the 
veritable " body and blood, soul and divin- 

* John vi., 51; also 58. 

" Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath 
sternal life." 
Ibid., vi, 54. 



80 HOW THE RET. DR. STONE 

ity" of the Lord, and gone, nevertheless, 
into eternal death. But yet your " anxious 
inquirer " does seem to come nearer now to 
what he was looking for — a sacrament that 
shall do its saving work on him independ- 
ently of the presence of that, the necessity 
of which casts a doubt on all Protestant 
hopes — faith on the part of the partaker. 
This is the satisfaction of the doctrine of the 
opus operatum, that it makes the saving 
virtue of the sacrament to depend, not on 
what it is difficult for the recipient to ascer- 
tain — his own faith: but on what it is abso- 
lutely impossible for him to ascertain — the 
intention of the priest. And not this alone. 
Before the priest, even with the best of in- 
tentions, has any power to consecrate the 
bread, and transform it into " the body and 
blood, soul and divinity'' of the Lord, he 
must have been ordained by a bishop who 
should, at the time of ordaining, have had 
" the intention of doing what the Church 
does," and who in turn should have been or- 
dained with a good intention by another 
bishop with a good intention, and so on ad 
infinitum, or at least ad Petrum. And when 
we bear in mind that the validity of the 
baptism of each of these depends just as 
absolutely on so many unknown and un- 
knowable "intentions/' and that in case of the 



BETTEFED HIS SITUATION. 8l 



invalidity of their baptism, which is " the 
gate of the sacraments,'' they were incapable 
of receiving ordination themselves, and so in- 
capable of conferring it, the chance of Dr. 
Stone's ever getting a morsel of genuine, 
certainly attested " body and blood, soul and 
divinity" between his lips, becomes, to a 
mathematical mind, infinitesimal. There 
have been cases of ecclesiastics who in their 
death-bed confessions have acknowledged 
the withholding of multitudes of "inten- 
tions." Who can guess what multitudes 
besides have been withheld with never a 
confession, or with a confession which has 
never been heard of. But the wilful with- 
holding need not be supposed. " The small- 
est mistake, even though made involuntari- 
ly, nullifies the whole act." * 

* Pope Innocent III., Ep. ix. " The Council of Florence 
had pronounced the same opinion. . . . Let an infidel 
or a dreamy priest bantize a child without having- seri- 
ously the idea of baptizing- it, that child, if he die, is lost; 
let a bishop ordain a priest, without having actually and 
formally, from absence of mind or any other cause, the 
idea of conferring the priesthood, and behold, we have a 
priest who is not a priest, and those whom he shall baptize, 
marry or absolve, will not be baptized, married or ab- 
solved. The pope himself, without suspecting it, might 
have been ordained in this manner ; and as it is from 
him that everything flows, all the bishops of the Church 
might some day find themselves to be false bishops, and 
all the priests false priests, without there being any possi- 
bility of restoring- the broken link. 1 ' Bungener, " Hist, of 
the Council of Trent," pp. 158, 159. The author evidently 
mistakes in making the validity of baptism to depend on 
priestly ordination. That alone of the sacraments is 
valid if administered (with intention) by a "Jew, pagan, 
or heretic. 11 

Bungener need not have put the case hypothetically. 
Writing at the period of the Great Western Schism, 



82 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

The hope of salvation through the sacra- 
ments of the Church grows dimmer and 
dimmer. It is well for our neophyte to 
cast about him and see if there be found no 
adjuvants that may reinforce in some meas- 
ure that "assurance of his salvation," to 
which the Holy Father has somewhat incon- 
siderately invited him. " It is a good and 
useful thing, "says the Council of Trent, 
"suppliantly to invoke the saints, and . . . 
to flee for refuge to their prayers, help and 
assistance. " It is commonly represented to 
Protestants that this is a mere recommenda- 
tion, and that nobody is required to invoke 
the saints ; but Dr. Stone has by this time 
been long enough under discipline to have 
found out that this is nothing but a polite 

"the papal secretary, Coluccio Salutato, paints in stronj 
colors the universal uncertainty and anguish of con- 
science produced by the Schism, and his own conclusion 
as a Papalist is that as all ecclesiastical jurisdiction is 
derived from the pope, and as a pope lnvalidly elected 
cannot give what he does not himself possess, no bishops 
or priests ordained since the death of Gregory XI. could 
guarantee the validity of the sacraments they adminis- 
tered. It followed according to him, that any one who 
adored the Eucharist consecrated by a priest ordained in 
schism worshipped an idol. Such was the condition of 
Western Christendom."— The Pope and the Council, by 
Janus, p. 240. 

It is doubtless, with reference to difficulties like these, 
that saving clauses are introduced into the utterances of 
the Church: "Without the sacraments or the desire for 
them;" "if any man wilfully separate from the com- 
munion of the Holy See," etc. But if these clauses save 
the difficulties of the Church's doctrine, then they destroy 
the doctrine itself. If the good intentions of the penitent 
are what secure to him the grace of the sacraments, then 
that grace does not depend on the intention of the priest; 
and the provision which so many souls are yearning for, of 
a through ticket to heaven that does not depend on their 
own interior character, is miserably cut off. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 83 

pretence, and to be convinced that if there 
is anything to be gained by saint- worship, 
he had better be about it, for " help and 
assistance " are what he is sadly in need of. 
But to which of the saints shall he take ref- 
uge? for there is an embarras de ricli- 
esses here. As to some of them, there is a 
serious and painful uncertainty, as in the 
case of Mrs. Harris, as to whether there is 
" any such a person." As to others, there is 
a strong human probability that in the 
" unpleasantness" that prevailed between 
heathen and Christian in the early times, they 
were on the wrong side. And in general, the 
Church fails to give certain assurance, as de 
-fide, concerning them, that they are yet in 
a position to act effectively as intercessors — 
whether, in fact, they are not to this day 
roasting in purgatory, and in sorer need of 
our intercession than we of theirs. The 
Church, we say, has not pronounced assured- 
ly and defide on this point ; and what Dr. 
Stone is invited to by the Holy Father, and 
what doubtless he means to get, is assurance, 
not "pious opinion. " 

It will be " safer " for Dr. Stone " to seek 
salvation through the Virgin Mary " than 
directly from Jesus. So at least he is taught 
in books authorized and indorsed by the 
Church. But this is a very slender gain, for 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



the same books assure him that without the 
intercession of Mary there is no safety at all — 
that " the intercession is not only useful but 
necessary " — that "to no one is the door of 
salvation open except through her" — that 
(i our salvation is in her hands " — that 
" Mary is the hope of our salvation ;"* so 
that the amount of this assurance (if one 
could be assured of its authority) is only 
this, that it is better than nothing at all. 

Undoubtedly, the Eev. Dr. Stone would 
do well to get him a scapular. "About 
the year 1251, the Holy Virgin appeared to 
the blessed St. Simon Stock, an English- 
man, and giving him her scapular, said to 
him that those who wore it should be safe 
from eternal damnation." Furthermore, 
" Mary appeared at another time to Pope 
John XXII., and directed him to declare to 
those who wore the above-mentioned scapu- 
lar, that they should be released from pur- 

* See " The Glories of Mary," by St. Alphonsus Liguori, 
approved by John, Archbishop of New York ; chapter v., 
on "the need we have of the intercession of Mary for 
our salvation. 1 ' It has been certified by the pope in 
the act of canonization that the writings of St. Alphon- 
sus contain nothing worthy of censure. But as it is, 
up to this present writing, impossible to say certain ly 
whether this was one of the pope's infallible utterances 
or one of his fallible ones— there we are again, in an 
uncertainty. 

For a full collection of authorized Roman Catholic 
teachings, to the effect that " it is impossible for any to 
be saved who turn away from Mary, or is disregarded by 
her," see Pusey's Eirenicon, p. 99, seqq.— bearing in mind, 
however, the claim of the efenders of the Roman Catho- 
lic system, that their Church is not to be considered re- 
sponsible for its own authorized teachings. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 85 

gatory on the Saturday after death " ; this 
the same pontiff announced in his bull, 
which was afterwards confirmed by ' c several 
other popes. " * This, declared in a book 
which is guaranteed by a pope to contain no 
false doctrine, is really the nearest that we 
can find in the entire Roman system to an 
assurance of salvation. But to the utter 
dismay of poor Dr. Stone, just as he is on 
the point of closing his hand on what the 
pope had invited him to— " laying hold/' 
as an old writer expresses it, "on eternal 
life" in the form of a scapular — he discov- 
ers not only that Pope Paul V., in 1612, 
added a sort of codicil to the Virgin's 
promise, which makes it doubtful, but in 
general, that the inerrant author of the 
Glories of Mary "protests that he does not 
intend to attribute any other thau purely 
human authority to all the miracles, revela- 
tions and incidents contained in this book."f 
But "purely human authority" is not ex- 
actly what we care to risk our everlasting 
salvation on ; is it, Dr. Stone ? 

Nothing seems to remain for our bewil- 
dered friend but to apply for indulgences. 
To be sure, he does not yet know that he 
has ever been effectually loosed from 

* Glories of Mary, pp. 271, 272, 660. 

t Glories of Mary, Protest of the Author, p. 4, 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



mortal sin, or if lie has "been, that he 
will not relapse into it and die in it; and 
in either case indulgences will do him no 
good. He will go down quick into hell, and 
not get his money back either. But, sup- 
posing him to have escaped eternal perdi- 
tion, it will be well worth while to have 
secured indulgences — which may be had of 
assorted lengths, from twenty-five day in- 
dulgences for " naming reverently the name 
of Jesus, or the name of Mary," up to 
twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand 
year indulgences, granted for weightier 
considerations. But, inasmuch as Dr. Stone 
has not the slightest idea how many mill- 
ions of years he may have to stay in pur- 
gatory, if he ever has the happiness to get 
there, it will be best for him to go in for 
plenary indulgences, and save all mistakes. 
There are various ways of securing them, 
and it may well employ all Dr. Stone's un- 
questionable talents how he shall get the 
amplest indulgence at the least cost of 
time and labor. On a superficial examina- 
tion, we are disposed to think that there is 
nothing better to recommend than the wear- 
ing of scapulars. 

Says St. Alphonsus de Liguori : "The in- 
dulgences that are attached to this scapular 
of our Lady of Mt. Carmel, as well as to 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 87 

the others of the Dolors of Mary, of Mary of 
Mercy, and particularly to that of the Con- 
ception, are innumerable, daily and plenary, 
in life and at the article of death. For my- 
self, I have taken all the above scapulars. 
And let it be particularly made known that 
besides many particular indulgences, there 
are annexed to the scapular of the Im- 
maculate Conception, which is blessed by 
the Theatine Fathers, all the indulgences 
which are granted to any religious order, 
pious place or person. And particularly by 
reciting 'Our Father,' 'Hail Mary,' and 
'Glory be to the Father,' six times in 
honor of the most holy Trinity and of the 
immaculate Mary, are gained each time 
all the indulgences of Rome, Portiuncula, 
Jerusalem, Gallicia, which reach the number 
of four hundred and thirty-three plenary 
indulgences, besides the temporal, which 
are innumerable. All this is transcribed 
from a sheet printed by the same Theatine 
Fathers."* Oh, if the Theatine Fathers 
were only infallible, or if we could be sure 
that indulgences were absolute, and not 
conditional upon sundry uncertainties, how 
happy we might be. But a great theologian, 
afterwards a Pope,f declared that "the 

♦Glories of Mary, p. 661. 

t Pope Adrian VI., Comm. on the Fourth Book of The 
Sentences, quoted by Bungener, Council of Trent, p. 4. 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



effects of the indulgence purchased or ac- 
quired, are not absolute, but more or less 
good, more or less complete, according to 
the dispositions of the penitent and the 
manner in which he performs the work to 
which the indulgence is attached." And 
one has only to glance through the pages 
of some theologian like Dr. Peter Dens, 
to find that this whole doctrine of in- 
dulgences is so contrived as to be, on 
the one hand, indefinitely corrupting and 
depraving to the common crowd of sinners, 
and, on the other hand, to give the least 
possible of solid comfort to fearful con- 
sciences. With every promise of remission 
that the Church gives — for a consideration 
— she reserves to herself a dozen qualifica- 
tions and evasions which make it of none 
effect.* 

In the dismal uncertainty which besets 
every expedient for securing one's salvation 
which we have thus far considered, our 
friend will devote himself in sheer despera- 
tion to works of mortification, which are 

*Dens, Tractat, cle Indulg., 34, 37, 38, 39, et passim. 
Says Cardinal Wiseman: •« For you, my Catholic breth- 
ren know that without a penitent confession of your 
sins and a worthy participation of the blessed Eucharist, 
no indulgence is anything worth." Doctrines of the 
Church Vol. ii., p. 76. This, however, is said m a course 
of lectures designed to commend the doctrines of the 
Church to Protestants; when the object has been to com- 
fort the devotee, or to raise revenue for the Roman 
treasury, the tone of the authorized representatives of 
the Church has sometimes been far more assuring. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 



alleged by his advisers to have a good 
tendency to " appease the wrath of God." 
Fastings and abstinences are good; but a 
hair shirt is far more effective, if his skin is 
tender; and we cannot doubt that flagella- 
tion is more serviceable than either. A good 
scourge is not expensive, but it should have 
bits of wire in the lashes, for a more rapid 
diminution of purgatorial 2^ains. Sundry 
contrivances applied to one's bed, or to the 
sole of one's shoes, are recommended by 
the experience of some eminent saints 
as of great efficacy in securing one against 
future torment. It would not be well for 
Dr. Stone, in his quest for assurance, to 
omit any of them. But, alas! when he has 
done all, he is in the same dreary, dismal 
darkness as before. 

Through such dim and doubtful ways 
the poor Doctor treads, halting and hesi- 
tating, till he comes towards the end of this 
weary life. Of all his friends who have 
departed this life before him, he has no 
confident assurance that they are not in 
hell; but he cherishes a hope that they may 
be roasting in the fires of purgatory, though 
he is aware that there is even a faint 
chance that they may be in heaven; but he 
pays for daily masses and indulgences in 
their behalf, being assured by the theolo- 



90 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



gians that if these do not help his friends, 
they may in all probability be of service 
to some one else.* The nearest to certainty 
that he comes on any such question is in the 
belief that his godly parents and friends 
that have lived and died in simple faith on 
the Lord Jesus Christ, are suffering ever- 
lasting damnation— and even this is doubt- 
ful. As the hour of death draws near he 
feels for his various scapulars, and finds 
them right; he sends for his confessor, and 
makes one more confession, which is sub- 
ject to all the doubtful conditions of those 
that have gone before; receives once more 
an absolution, which is absolute in its 
terms, but conditional in its meaning- and 
receives the half of a eucharist, the ef- 
ficiency of which depends on an uncertain 
combination of conditions in his own soul 
and history, complicated with an utterly 
unascertainable series of facts in the hidden 
intention of every one of a series of priests 
and bishops back to Simon Peter himself. 
This done, the Church approaches him with 
a final sacrament, which promises once 
more to do what it thereby acknowledges 
that the other sacraments have failed to 
accomplish — to "wipe away offences, if 
any remain, and the remains of sin "—to 
"confer grace and remit sins."f 

* Dens, Tract, de Indulg., No. 40. 
f Cone. Trid. Sess. xiv., Can. 2. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 91 

But it is entirely unsettled among theo- 
logians what this promise means. It can- 
not be the remitting of mortal sin, for if 
the penitent have any such unforgiven, he 
is not allowed to receive the unction ; and 
it cannot refer to venial sins, for a good 
many reasons that are laid down; audit 
cannot mean " proneness or habit left from 
past sin," for "it often happens that they 
who recover after the sacrament feel the 
same proneness to sin as before." * In fact, 
at the conclusion of the sacrament Dr. 
Stone will send for his lawyer, and if any- 
thing remains of his property after his 
heavy expenditure in masses and indul- 
gences for the benefit of his deceased 
friends, he will leave it by will, to be given 
for masses to shorten up the torments which 
after all these labors and prayers to Mary, 
and mortifications, and sacraments, he still 
perceives to be inevitable f But, even in 
this he bethinks himself of the uncertainty 
whether masses, paid for in advance, will 

*Bellarmine, de Extr. Unct. i., 9, T. ii., p. 1198, 9. Quoted 
in Pusey's Eirenicon, 209-211. 

t A most striking instance of this is recorded in one of 
the most interesting and recent records of Roman 
Catholic piety— the Life of the Cur6 d'Ars. The old Cure 
of Ars had lived a life of preeminent holiness, in which 
his acts of self-mortification had been so austere and 
cruel as to have broken down his health— such that 
others could not hear them described without a shudder. 
As his death drew near he "desired to be fortified by 
the grace of the last sacrament " ; and the Abbe Vianney 



92 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

ever be actually said or sung.* But, poor 
soul, it is the best lie can do, and so he gets 
them to give him a blessed taper to hold, 
and gives up the ghost while it burns out, 
and they sprinkle his body with holy water, 
and bury it in consecrated ground to keep it 
safe from the demons; and his children give 
their money to get him out of purgatory 
(in case he is there), and down to the latest 
generation never know (unless their money 
gives out) whether they have succeeded, 
or whether, in fact, he has not all the while 
been hopelessly in hell along with his good 
old father and mother. 

We cannot better wind up this exhibi- 
tion of the way in which the Church of 
Rome fulfils her promise of giving as- 
surance of salvation, than by quoting the 

then heard his confession, and administered to him the last 
rites of the Church. ..." The following day the Abbe 
Vianney celebrated a mass for his revered master, at 
which all the villagers were present. When this service 
was concluded, M. Bailey requested a private interview 
with his vicar. During this last and solemn conversation, 
the dying man placed in his bands the instruments of his 
penitence (scourges, etc.). 'Take care, my poor Vianney, 1 
he said, 'to hide these things; if they find them after my 
death they will think l have done something during my 
life for the expiation of my sins, and they will leave me 
in purgatory to the end of the world.' " The Cure d'Ars. 
A Memoir of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney. ByGeorgina 
Molyneux. London, 1869. 

* There will hardly fail to occur to him the scan- 
dalous cause celebre tried some years since in Paris — 
the case of a large brokerage in masses for the dead, 
which undertook to get the masses performed by country 
priests at a lower figure than the ruling city prices, but 
was detected in retaining the money without securing the 
saying of the masses at all. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 93 

language of a most competent witness, the 
Rev. J. Blanco White, once a Roman 
Catholic theologian in high standing in 
Spain, afterwards a Protestant, whose 
trustworthiness is vouched for by Father 
Newman, from intimate personal acquaint- 
ance.* Mr. White says: 

"The Catholic who firmly believes in 
the absolving power of his Church, and 
never indulges in thought, easily allays all 
fears connected with the invisible world. 
Is there a priest at hand to bestow abso- 
lution at the last moment of life, he is sure 
of a place in heaven, however sharp the 
burnings may be which are appointed for 
him in purgatory. 

"But, alas for the sensitive, the con- 
sistent, the delicate mind that takes the 
infallible church for its refuge ! That 
church offers, indeed, certainty in every- 
thing that concerns our souls; but, Thou, 
God, who hast witnessed my misery and 
that of my nearest relations — my mother 
and my two sisters — knowest that the 
promised certainty is a bitter mockery. 
The Catholic pledges of spiritual safety 
are the most agonizing sources of doubt. 

*"I have the fullest confidence in his word when 
he witnesses to facts, and facts which he knew." He 
was one *' who had special means of knowing a Catholic 
country, and a man you can trust." Lectures on the 
Present Position of Catholics in England, bv John Henry 
Newman, D.D. 1851. 



94 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

"The sacraments intended for pardon 
of sins could not (according to the common 
notions) fail in producing the desired 
effect. For if, as was subsequently given 
out, all those divinely instituted rites de- 
manded such a spiritual state in the re- 
cipient as, without any external addition, 
would produce the desired effect, what 
advantage would be offered to the believ- 
er? If absolution demanded true repent- 
ance to deliver from sin, this was leaving 
the sinner in the same condition as he was 
in before even the name of the pretended 
Sacrament of Penance was heard of in the 
world. But, if these conditions alone can 
give security, no thinking person, and es- 
pecially no anxious, timid person, can find 
certainty in the use of the Sacraments. 
And none but the naturally bold and con- 
fident do find it. To these the Sacraments, 
instead of being means of virtue, are 
encouragements of vice and iniquity. 

" O God ! if Thou couldst hate anything 
Thou hast made, what weight of indigna- 
tion would have fallen upon a Constantine 
and an Alva! And yet the former, having 
put off baptism till the last opportunity 
of sinning should be on the point of van- 
ishing with the last breath of life, declares 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 95 

the heavenly happiness which filled his 
soul from the moment he came out of the 
baptismal water; the latter, that cold- 
blooded butcher of thousands, declares 
that he dies without the least remorse. On 
the other hand, have I not seen the most 
innocent among Thy worshippers live and 
die in a maddening fear of hell ! They 
tremble at the Sacraments themselves, lest, 
from want of a firm preparation, they 
should increase their spiritual danger." * 

It might be very tedious to read, but it 
would certainly be very easy to present, 
like proofs to show that in "heeding the 
invitation " of the Pope to come to him for 
infallible teaching in matters of belief ] Dr. 
Stone has come only to like grief and 
anxious uncertainty. He has stated very 
neatly the fallacy of those who have sought 
for an infallible interpreter of scripture in 
the writings of the Fathers. " They do not 
see that in place of acting upon a new rule, 
they have only increased the difficulties of 
the old; that instead of obtaining an in- 
terpreter, they have only multiplied the 
number of the documents, which they 
must themselves interpret, or have inter- 
preted for them " ; and " are, in fact, re- 

* Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, written by him- 
self. Edited by John Hamilton Thorn. London, 1845. 
Vol. III., pp. 356-258. 



96 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

sorting to what has been aptly called 'the 
most ingenious of all Protestant contri- 
vances for submitting to nothing and no- 
body.' "* Marvellous! that a man who is 
so shrewd to perceive this fallacy in the 
system he has just left, should be so blind 
to the same fallacy in the system he has 
just adopted! He had 

" Jumped into a bramble bush 
And scratched out both his eyes; 

" And when he saw his eyes were out, 
With all his might and main, 
He jumped into another bush 
To scratch them in again." 

By just so far as his new teacher is in- 
fallible, it is simply documentary — paper 
and printer's ink — Fathers, Councils, Bulls, 
Briefs, more Bulls, more Briefs, and an- 
other Council again, documents upon docu- 
ments, all in the Latin tongue (which, 
happily, Dr. Stone is able to read), until 
the world cannot hold the books that 
have been written. But, on the other hand, 
just as far as he has access to his new 
teacher as a living teacher — a representa- 
tive of the Catholic hierarchy — he finds 
him confessedly fallible — an uninspired 
priest or bishop, likely enough an un- 
convicted heretic, and at least liable to 
all human blunders and endless "varia- 

* The Invitation Heeded, pp. 158, 159. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 97 

tions " in expounding and applying the 
faith of the Church. If, disgusted with 
these miserable comforters, he carries his 
doubts to the apostolic threshold, and re- 
ceives a solution of them from the succes- 
sor of Peter himself, it is a poor reward 
for his pilgrimage, when he learns that the 
words of the pontiff spoken in his capacity 
as a private teacher are no more infallible 
than those of any Protestant minister. So 
that the certainty of poor Dr. Stone's faith, 
unless he chooses the alternate risk of going 
to the documents himself, and taking his 
chance of being " saved by scholarship," 
or by "private interpretation," is resolved 
into the mere " fides implicita " — of being 
willing to believe the truth if he only 
knew what it was — and that, if we under- 
stand him, is just what he had before he 
got the Pope's letter, with the exception 
that at that time there were fewer elements 
of uncertainty in his mind. 

And just as with questions of truth, so 
is it with questions of duty. In search of 
definiteness and certainty he has gone voy- 
aging upon a waste of dreary casuistry, 
upon whose fluctuating surface he lies be- 
calmed, tossed to and fro between " proba- 
bilism " and " probabiliorism," and oh, how 
seasick! There is nothing 1 for him but 



HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 



to "do as they do in Spain " ; and how that 
is we learn from Father Newman's friend, 
Blanco White : 

" In a country where every person's con- 
science is in the keeping of another, in an 
interminable succession of moral trusts, 
the individual conscience cannot be under 
the steady discipline of self-governing prin- 
ciple; all that is practised is obedience to 
the opinion of others, and even that obedi- 
ence is inseparably connected with the 
idea of a dispensing power. If you can 
obtain an opinion favorable to your wishes, 
the responsibility falls on the adviser, and 
you may enjoy yourself with safety. The 
adviser, on the other hand, having no con- 
sciousness of the action, has no sense of 
remorse; and thus the whole morality of 
the country, except in very peculiar cases, 
wants the steady ground of individual re- 
sponsibility."* 

The sum of the whole matter seems to 
be this, that the certainty and confidence 
of the disciple of the Church of Rome, 
whether regarding matter of belief or 
matter of practice, consists in putting his 
head in a bag and giving the string to his 
confessor. 

The " invitation heeded " by Dr. Stone 

*Life of J. Blanco White, L, p. 33. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 99 

contains other seductive promises, which it 
would be well for us to consider if there 
were time. We can only allude with a 
word to the excellent things which His 
Holiness offers, in this invitation, to society 
and government in Protestant countries, 
in pity of the misfortunes under which he 
perceives them now to be suffering. 

"Whoever recognizes religion as the 
foundation of human society, cannot but 
perceive and acknowledge what disastrous 
effect this division of principles, this oppo- 
sition, this strife of religious sects among 
themselves, has had upon civil society, and 
how powerfully this denial of the authority 
established by God to determine the belief 
of the human mind, and to direct the 
actions of men as well in private as in 
social life, has excited, spread, and fostered 
those deplorable upheavals, those commo- 
tions by which almost all people are griev- 
ously disturbed and afflicted." " On this 
longed-for return to the truth and unity 
of the Catholic Church depends the salva- 
tion not only of individuals, but also of all 
Christian society; and never can the world 
enjoy true peace unless there shall be one 
fold and one Shepherd."* 

We see here the value of an infallible 

* Letter of Pope Pius IX., Sept. 13, 1868. 



100 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

teacher! If it had not been revealed to us 
thus from heaven, we never should have 
guessed that what secured national tran- 
quillity was national adherence to the Holy 
See. But now we see it — by the eye of faith. 
Poor England, racked with intestine com- 
motions ! — if she could but learn the secret 
of Spanish order and tranquillity and pros- 
perity ! Unhappy Scotland, the prey of 
social anarchy, and devoured by thriftless 
indolence ! will she not cast one glance 
across the sea, and lay to heart the lesson 
of Irish serenity and peace and wealth ? 
Poor Protestant Prussia, and Denmark, and 
Scandinavia, " grievously disturbed and 
afflicted" by "those deplorable upheavals 
and commotions " which His Holiness talks 
about, and yet so pitifully unconscious of 
them* all ! How slight the price — a mere 
" Fall down and worship me " — with which 
the}^ might purchase to themselves the 
sweet calmness and good order and un- 
broken quiet that have characterized the 
history of Catholic France and Italy, and 
even the ineffable beatitude of those happy 
States of the Church, which, ungrateful 
for their unparalleled blessings, were wait- 
ing at that very time for a good chance 
to put the Pope (in his temporal capacity) 
into the Tiber ! Nay, nay ! Let us not 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 101 

refuse to bring home the teaching of our 
Shepherd to our own bosoms. What land 
has been more the victim of " this divi- 
sion of principles, this opposition, this 
strife of religious sects among them- 
selves," than our own unhappy country? 
Ah ! were the people wise ! Do they not 
feel the " disastrous effects " of their re- 
fusal to submit to the Holy See — the 
" deplorable upheavals, and commotions," 
and all ? Can they resist the allurements 
of those examples of national happiness 
which fill the whole western hemisphere, 
save the two pitiable exceptions of Canada 
and the United States ? Speak, dear Dr. 
Stone, speak once more to your infatuated 
fellow-countrymen, and persuade them, if 
you can, to end this hundred years' history 
of commotion and revolution and dis- 
astrous change which they have lately 
completed, by substituting the majestic 
stability of Mexico, and Guatemala, and 
Colombia, and all the Catholic continent 
down to the Straits of Magellan ! * Al- 

* Father Hyacinthe does not seem to come up to the 
standard of Roman doctrine on this point. "Ah, well, 
I know— and many a time have I groaned within my- 
self to think of it— these nations of the Latin race and 
of the Catholic religion have been of late the most 
grievously tried of all 1 Not only by intestine fires, by the 
quaking of the earth, by the inrushing of the sea. Look 
with impartial eye, with the fearless serenity of truth, 
with that assurance of faith which fears not to accept the 
revelations of experience, and then tell me where it is 
that the moral foundations quake most violently ? Where 



102 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

ready a ray of hope shines in upon the dark- 
ness of the Protestant land. One bright 
spot is irradiated with the triumph — the 
partial triumph — of Roman principles of 
government. Can it be irrational to hope 
that when these principles prevail in the 
same degree throughout the land, we shall 
have everywhere, under state and general 
governments, the same placid order, the 
same security for life and property, the 
same freedom from turbulence and riot, the 
same purity of elections, the same integ- 
rity in the discharge of public trusts, the 
same awfulness of judicial virtue as pre- 
vail in the Catholic city and county of 
New York? 

We have left ourselves very little space 
to express as we would like the real respect 
which, after all, we feel for this book, and 
still more for its author. With here and 
there a slip in grammar or diction, and 
with no more of pedantry than can easily 
be pardoned to the author's vocation, 
the work is elegantly written; and if there 
does seem to be a dreadful gap between 

does the current of a formidable electricity give the 
severest, the most incessant shocks to republics as 
well as monarchies? Among the Latin races, among the 
Catholic nations. Yes, by some inscrutable design of 
Providence, they, more than others, have had to ' drink 
of the cup deep and large 1 ; they have wet their lips more 
deeply in the chalice in which are mingled ' the wine, the 
lightning, and the spirit of the storm '; and they have be- 
come possessed with the madness of the drunkard." Dis- 
courses of Father Hyacinthe, Vol. I., p. 155. 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 103 

what the author intended when he started, 
and what he found where he stopped, it 
must be acknowledged that he passes from 
starting point to goal with consecutive steps 
along an intelligible path. His argument, 
although encumbered with mistakes, is. 
nevertheless, good against any opponent 
who accepts his premise — that the Church 
Universal is a visible corporation. His 
appeal to all Protestants to examine with 
candor the grounds of their belief, and 
bravely and sincerely accept the conse- 
quences, is earnest, tender and touching — 
all the more so, as the unhappy author in 
his very exhortation, evidently looks back 
upon those generous moments when he 
himself was practising these virtues, as 
Adam might have looked back upon Para- 
dise. Those hours can never return. Never 
more may he exercise the manly virtue 
which he now commends to others, and 
which we doubt not he faithfully practised 
until it became a prohibited good. Let 
him now attempt to look into the writings 
of those who differ from him, with a view 
to "examining candidly the grounds of his 
faith," and the thunderbolt of the excom- 
munication latCB sententice breaks forth 
upon him from the Bull In Ccena Domini.* 

* Ligorii Theol. Moral, 63, 735. 



104 HOW THE REV. DR. STONE 

We are so affected by the honest doctor's 
exhortation to candid inquiry, that we 
shrink from putting ourselves, like him, in 
a situation in which if we candidly inquire 
we are damned. 

The little volume will reasonably be ex- 
pected to be more effective as a fact and a 
testimony than as an argument. As a tes- 
timony, its precise value is this : Until 
middle life, the author, believing him- 
self to be entirely sincere and candid, held, 
as the result of private judgment, a system 
(according to his own statement) wildly 
inconsistent, illogical and self -destructive, 
which he vindicated to himself and others 
by arguments plausible and satisfactory. 
In the course of a few months, after can- 
did but brief examination, in the exercise 
of the same private judgment, he dropped 
that system and (also with entire sincerity) 
adopted another, sustained by plausible 
arguments which he is not permitted can- 
didly to re-examine. It is solely by the 
use of the same private judgment that 
played him so false before, that he has 
come to embrace this other system. 

Qu.: — What is the probability that he 
has got the truth now ? 

That is what he may never know. 

One thing alone he holds intelligently — 



BETTERED HIS SITUATION. 105 

that the Roman Church is the true church 
of Christ; and this he knows only by his 
poor private judgment, which he is not 
permitted to revise. Everything else he 
takes on the authority of this. And this, 
being known only by private judgment, 
may be a mistake ! 
Poor man ! 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON 



THE REAL PRISONER 
OF CHILLON. 



"A character more celebrated than 
known " is Francis Bonivard, prior of St. 
Victor and Prisoner of Chillon. It is not 
by any intentional imposture on his part 
that he goes stalking through modern liter- 
ature disguised in the character of hero, 
saint and martyr, and shouting in a hoarse 
chest-voice his "appeal from tyranny to 
God." In fact, if he could be permitted 
to revisit his cherished little shelf of books 
about which has grown the ample library 
of the University of Geneva, and view the 
various delineations of himself by artist, 
poet, and even serious historian, it would 
be delightful to witness his comical aston- 
ishment. Perhaps it is not to be laid to 
the fault of Lord Byron, who after visiting 
the old castle and its dungeon beguiled the 
hours of a rainy day at the inn at Ouchy 
with writing a poem concerning which he 
frankly confesses that he had not the 
slightest knowledge of its hero. Hobhouse, 
his companion, ought to have been better 
informed, but was not. If anybody is 



110 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

to blame, it is the recent writers, who do 
know the facts, but are unwilling to hurt 
so fine an heroic figure or to dethrone "one 
of the demigods of the liberal mythology." 
Enough to say that the Muse of History 
has been guilty of one of those practical 
jokes to which she is too much addicted, in 
dressing with tragic buskins and muffling 
in the cloak of a hero of melodrama, and 
so palming off for earnest on two genera- 
tions of mankind, the drollest wag of the 
sixteenth century. 

A wild young fellow like Bonivard, with 
a lively appreciation of the ridiculous, 
could not fail to see the comic aspect of the 
fate which invested him with the spiritual 
and temporal authority and emoluments of 
the priory of St. Victor. This was a rich 
little Benedictine monastery just outside 
the eastern gate of Geneva, on the little 
knoll now crowned by the observatory, 
surrounded with walls and moat of its own, 
independent of the Bishop of Geneva in 
spiritual matters, and in temporal affairs 
equally independent of the city: in fact, it 
was a petty sovereignty by itself, and its 
dozen of hearty, well-provided monks, 
though nominally under the rule of Cluny, 
were a law to themselves, and not a very 
rigid one either. The office of prior, hy 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. Ill 

virtue of a little arrangement at Rome, de- 
scended to Bonivard from his uncle, im- 
mediately upon whose demise the young 
potentate of twenty-one took upon him the 
state and functions of his office in a way to 
show the monks of St. Victor that they 
had no King Log to deal with. The doc- 
ument is still extant in the Latin of the 
period, in which Prior Bonivard ordains 
that every new brother at his initiation 
shall not only stand treat all round, but 
shall, at his own cost and charges, furnish 
every one of his brethren with a new cap. 
Another document of equal gravity makes 
new ordinances concerning the convent- 
kitchen, which seems to have been one of 
the good prior's most religious cares.* Not 
only his own subjects, but those of other 
jurisdictions, were made to feel the majesty 
of his sovereign authority. He would let 
them know that he had "just as much 
jurisdiction at St. Victor as the Duke of 
Savoy had at Chambery." He heard causes, 
sentenced to prison, even received ambas- 
sadors from his brother the duke, but not 
without looking sharply at their credentials. 
If these were wanting, the unfortunate 
wretches were threatened with the gallows 

* The documents are given in full in the appendix of Dr. 
J. J. Chapponiere's memoir in vol. iv. of the Mem. de la 
Soc. Archeol. de Geneve. The former is signed by Boni- 
vard, apostolic prothonotary and poet-laureate. 



112 THE REAL PRISONER OP CHILLON. 

as spies, and when they had been thorough- 
ly frightened the monarch would indulge 
himself in the exercise of the sweetest pre- 
rogative of royalty, the pardoning power, 
and, when it was considered that the maj- 
esty of the state had been sufficiently as- 
serted, would wind up with asking the 
whole company to dinner. 

It had been considered a clever stroke of 
policy, at a time when the dukes of Savoy 
and the bishops of Geneva, who agreed in 
nothing else, were plotting, together or 
separately, to capture and extinguish the 
immemorial liberties of the brave little free 
city, to get this fortified outpost before its 
very gate officered by a brilliant and daring 
young Savoyard gentleman, who would be 
bound to the duke by his nativity and to 
the Church by his office, and to both by his 
interests. To the dismay of bishop and 
duke, it appeared that the young prior, 
who had led a gay life of it at the Uni- 
versity of Turin, had nevertheless read his 
classics to some purpose, and had come 
back with his head full of Plato and Plu- 
tarch and Livy and of theories of republi- 
can liberty. So that by putting him into 
St. Victor they had turned that little 
stronghold from an outpost of attack upon 
Geneva liberties into the favorite resort 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CH1LLON. 113 

and rendezvous of all the young liberal 
leaders of that gay but gallant little re- 
public, who found themselves irresistibly 
drawn to young Bonivard, partly as a re- 
publican and still more as a jolly good 
fellow. 

The first manifestation of his sympathies 
in that direction occurred soon after his 
installation as prior. His uncle on his 
deathbed had confessed to young Francis 
the burden on his conscience in that he had 
taken Church money and applied it to the 
making of a battery of culverins wherewith 
to levy war against one of his neighbors in 
the country; and bequeathed to his nephew 
the convent and the culverins, with the 
charge to melt down the latter into a chime 
of church-bells which should atone for his 
evil deeds. Not long after, Bonivard was 
telling the story to his friend, Berthelier, 
the daring and heroic leader of the "Sons 
of Geneva " in their perilous struggle 
against tyranny, when the latter exclaimed : 
"What! spoil good cannon to make bells? 
Never! Give us the guns, and you shall 
have old metal to make bells enough to 
split your ears. But let guns be guns. So 
the Church will be doubly served. There 
will be chimes at St. Victor and guns in 
Geneva, which is a Church city." The 



114 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

bargain was struck, as a vote in the records 
of the city council shows to this day. But 
it was the "beginning of a quarrel with the 
Duke of Savoy which was to cost Bonivard 
more than he had counted on. There was 
reckless deviltry enough among all these 
young liberals, but some of them — not 
Bonivard — were capable of seriously count- 
ing the cost of their game. On one occasion 
— it was at the christening of Berthelier's 
child, and Bonivard was godfather — Ber- 
theliertook his friend aside from the guests 
and said, "It is time Ave had done with 
dancing and junketing and organized for 
the defence of liberty."— " All right!" 
said the prior. "Come on, and may the 
Lord prosper our crazy schemes!" Ber- 
thelier took his hand, and with a serious 
look that sobered the rattle-headed eccle- 
siastic for a moment, replied, " But let me 
warn you that this is going to cost you your 
living and me my head." — "I have heard 
him say this a hundred times," says Boni- 
vard in his Chronicles. The dungeon at 
Chillon and the mural tablet in the Tour 
de l'Isle at Geneva tell how truly the 
prophecy was fulfilled. 

There was so little of the strut of the 
stage-hero about Bonivard that he could 
not be comfortable in doing a chivalrous 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 115 

thing without a joke to take off the gloss 
of it. Before the ducal party had quite 
given up hopes of him there was a serious 
affair on their hands — the need of putting 
out of the way by such means, treacherous 
and atrocious, as the Savoyards of that day 
loved to use, one of the noblest of the 
Geneva magistrates, Aime Levrier. An 
emissary of the duke, of high rank, kins- 
man to Bonivard, came to St. Victor and 
offered the prior magnificent inducements 
to aid in the plot. With a gravity that 
must have convulsed the spectators if there 
had been any, Bonivard pointed to his mo- 
nastic gown, his prayer-book and his cru- 
cifix, and pleaded his deep sense of the sa- 
credness of his office as a reason for having 
nothing to do with the affair. " Then," 
says his kinsman, rising in wrath, "I will 
do the business myself. I'll have Levrier 
out of his bed and over in Savoy this very 
night." — "Do you really mean it, uncle? 
Give me your hand! " — " Then you consent, 
after all, to help me in the matter?" — 
"Oh no, uncle, that isn't it. But I know 
these Genevese are a hasty sort of folk, 
and I am just going to raise thirty florins 
to be spent in saying masses to-morrow for 
the repose of your soul." Before the even- 
ing was over, Bonivard found an oppor- 



116 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

tunity of slipping in disguise over to the 
house of Levrier and giving a hint of what 
was intended: the notes of preparation for 
resistance that Berthelier and his friends 
began at once to make wrought upon the 
excited nerves of the ambassador and his 
armed retinue to such a point that they 
were fain to escape from the town by a se- 
cret gate before daylight. 

The affair of his rescue of Pecolat is an- 
other illustration of his character and of 
the strange, turbulent age in which he 
lived; and it went far to embitter the 
hatred of the duke and the bishop against 
him. This poor fellow was the jester, 
song-singer and epigrammatist of the mad- 
cap patriots who were associated under the 
title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a 
trumped-up charge of plotting the death 
of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried 
away to one of the castles in the neighbor- 
hood, and there tortured until a false con- 
fession was wrung from him implicating 
Berthelier and others. To secure his con- 
demnation to death he was brought back 
into the city and presented before the court ; 
but the sight of the poor cripple, racked 
and bruised with recent tortures, and his 
steadfastness in recanting his late confes- 
sion, wrought more with the judges than 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 117 

the fear of the duke, and he was acquitted. 
But the feeble and ferocious bishop, moved 
partly by malignity, and partly, no doubt, 
by sincere and cowardly terror, was re- 
solved to kill him; and by some fiction de- 
claring him to have been in the minor 
orders, he clapped him into the bishop's 
prison, claiming to try him by ecclesiastical 
law. The story of renewed tortures in- 
flicted on their helpless comrade, and their 
knowledge of the certain death that awaited 
him, stirred the blood of the patriots of 
Geneva. It was just the moment for the 
prior of St. Victor to show that the studies 
at Freiburg and Turin that had made him 
doctor utriusque juris had not been in 
vain. He would fight the bishop with his 
own weapon of Church law. He despatched 
Pecolat's own brother with letters to the 
Archbishop of Vienne, metropolitan to the 
Bishop of Geneva, and, using his family in- 
fluence, which was not small, he secured a 
summons to the bishop and chapter of 
Geneva to appear before the archiepiscopal 
court and give account of the affair, and 
meanwhile to cease all proceedings against 
the prisoner. 

It was comparatively easy to procure the 
summons. The difficulty was to find some 
one competent to the functions of episcopal 



118 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

usher and bold enough to serve it. Boni- 
vard bethought him of a " caitiff wretch " 
— an obscure priest — to whom he handed 
the document with two round dollars lying 
on it, and bade him hand the paper to the 
bishop at mass the next day in the cathedral. 
The starving clergyman hesitated long be- 
tween his fears and his necessities, but finally 
promised to do the work on condition that the 
prior should stand by him in person and see 
him through. The hour approached, and the 
commissioner's courage was oozing rapidly 
away. His knees knocked together, and he 
slipped back in the crowd, hoping to es- 
cape. The vigilant prior darted after him, 
seized him, and laying his hand on the dag- 
ger that he wore under his robe, whispered 
in his ear, " Do it or I'll stab you ! " He 
adds, in his Chronicles, "I should have 
been as good as my word : I do not say it 
by way of boasting. I know I was acting 
like a fool, but I was quite beside myself 
with anxiety for my friend." Happily, 
there was no need of extreme measures. 
He gripped his terrified victim by the thumb, 
and as the procession moved towards the 
church-door he thrust the paper into his 
hand, saying, " Now's the time ! You've 
got to do it." And all the time he held him 
fast by the thumb. The bishop came near, 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 119 

and Bonivard let go the wretch's thumb 
and pushed him to the front, pointing to 
the prelate and saying, " Do your work ! " 
The bishop turned pale with terror of assas- 
sination as he heard the words. But the 
trembling clerk, not less terrified than the 
bishop, dropped on his knees and presented 
the archiepiscopal mandate, gasping out, 
"My lord, inhibitur v obis , pr out incopia." 
Bonivard retreated into his inviolable sanc- 
tuary of St. Victor. "I was young enough 
and crazy enough," he says, " to fear neither 
bishop nor duke." He had saved poor Peco- 
lat's life, although the work was not finished 
until the publication of an interdict from 
the metropolitan silencing every church- 
bell and extinguishing every altar-candle in 
the city had brought the bishop to terms.* 
It is a hardship to the writer to be com- 
pelled to retrench the story of the early 
deeds for liberty of Bonivard and his boon 
companions. There is a rollicking swagger 
about them all, which by and by begins to 
be sobered when it is seen that "on the side 
of the oppressor there ispower." By violence, 

♦The story is told by Bonivard himself in his Chronicles, 
and may be found in full detail in the Second Series of Dr. 
Merle d'Aubigne's volumes on the Reformation, vol. i. 
chaps, viii. and x. The story that P^colat, about to be sub- 
mitted a second time to the torture, and fearing lest he 
might be again tempted to accuse his friends, attempted 
to cut off his own tongue with a razor, seems to be au- 
thenticated. The whole story is worthy of being told at 
full length in English, it is so full of generous heroism. 



120 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLOX. 



by fraudulent promises, by foul treachery 
on the part of cowardly citizens, the Duke 
of Savoy gains admittance with his army 
within the walls of Geneva, and begins his 
delicious and bloody revenge for the indig- 
nities that have been put upon his preten- 
sions and usurpations. Berthelier, a very 
copy from the antique — a hero that might 
have stepped forth into the sixteenth cen- 
tury from the page of Plutarch * — remained 
in the town serenely to await the death 
which he foreknew. On the day of the 
duke's entrance Bonivard, who had no such 
relish for martyrdom for its own sake, put 
himself between two of his most trusted 
friends, the Lord of Voruz and the Abbot of 
Montheron of the Pays de Vaud, and gal- 
loped away disguised as a monk. " Come 
first to my convent," said the abbot, " and 
thence we will take you to a place of 
safety." The convent was reached, and in 
the morning Bonivard was greeted by his 
comrade Voruz, who came into his room, 
and, laying paper and pen before him, re- 
quired him to write a renunciation of his 
priory in favor of the Abbot of Montheron. 
Resistance was vain. He was a prisoner in 
the hands of traitors. The alternative being 

* "Je n'ai vu ni lu oncques un si grand m^priseur de 
mort," says Bonivard in his Chronicles. 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 121 

" Your priory or your life ! " he frankly 
owns that he required no time at all to make 
up his choice. Voruz took the precious 
document, with the signature still wet, and 
went out, double locking the door behind 
him. His two friends turned him over to 
the custody of the duke, who locked him 
up for two years at Grolee, one of his 
castles down the Rhone, and put the honest 
Abbot of Montheron in possession of the 
rich living of St. Victor. 

But Bonivard in his prison was less to be 
pitied than the citizens of Geneva who re- 
mained in their subjugated city. The two 
despots, the bishop and the duke, who had 
seized the unhappy town, combined to crush 
the gay and insubordinate spirit out of it. 
All this time, says Bonivard, "they im- 
prisoned, they scourged, they tortured, they 
beheaded, they hung, so as it is pitiful to 
tell." 

Meanwhile, the influential family friends 
of Bonivard, some of them high in court 
favor, discovering that he was yet alive and 
in prison, bestirred themselves to procure 
his liberation ; and not in vain, for the pos- 
session that had made him dangerous, the 
priory of St. Victor, having been wrested 
from him, there was little harm that he could 
do. His immediate successor in the priory, 



122 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

good Abbot de Montheron, had not in- 
deed long enjoyed the benefice. He had 
gone on business to Home, where certain 
Churchmen who admired his new benefice 
invited him (so Bonivard tells the story) to 
a banquet more Romano, and gave him 
a dose of the " cardinal powder," which 
operated so powerfully that it purged the 
soul right out of the body. He left a paper 
behind him in which, as a sign of remorse 
for his crime, he resigned all his rights in 
the priory back to Bonivard.* But the pope, 
whose natural affection towards his cousins 
and nephews overflowed freely in the form 
of gifts of what did not belong to him, be- 
stowed the living on a cousin, who com- 
muted it for an annual revenue of six 
hundred and forty gold crowns — a splen- 
did revenue for those days — and poor Boni- 
vard, whose sole avocation was that of 
gentleman, found it difficult to carry on 
this line of business with neither capital 
nor income. He came back, some five 
years later, into possession of the priory. 
They were five years of exciting changes, 
of fierce terrorism and oppression at Geneva, 
followed by a respite, a rallying of the 
spirit of the people, an actual recovery of 
some of the old rights of the city, and, 

* The text of this act is given by Chaponniere, p. 156. 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 123 

presently, by the beginning of some signs 
of religious light coming from the direction 
of Germany. And the way in which Boni- 
vard at last got reinstalled into his convent 
is curiously illustrative of the strange con- 
dition of society in those times. One May 
morning in 1527 the little town was all 
agog with strange news from Rome. The 
Eternal City had been taken by storm, 
sacked, pillaged, burned ! The Roman 
bishop was prisoner to the Roman emperor, 
if indeed he was alive at all. In fact, 
there was a rumor — dreadful, no doubt, but 
attended by vast consolations — that the 
whole court of Rome had perished. Im- 
mediately there was a rush to the bishop's 
palace, and a scramble for the vacant liv- 
ings in the diocese that had been held by 
absentees at Rome. The bishop, delighted 
at such a windfall of patronage, dispensed 
his favors right and left, not forgetting, 
says Bonivard, to reserve something com- 
fortable for himself in the shape of a fat 
convent that had been held by a cardinal. 
This was Bonivard's opportunity, and, 
times and the bishop having changed, he 
got back once more into his cherished quar- 
ters as prior of St. Victor. The convent 
was there, and the friars, but the estates 
that had been wont to keep them all right 



124 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

royally were mostly in the hands of the 
duke and his minions. It is in the effort 
to recover these that Bonivard shines out 
in his most magnificent character, that of 
military hero. The campaign of Cartigny 
includes the most memorable of his feats of 
arms. 

Cartigny was an estate about six miles 
down the left bank of the Rhone from 
Geneva appertaining to St. Victor. "It 
was a chastel of pleasaunce, not a forter- 
esse," says our hero, who is the Homer of 
his own brave deeds. But the duke kept a 
garrison there, and to every demand the 
prior made for his place he replied that he 
did not dare give it up for fear of being ex- 
communicated by the pope. Rent-time 
came, and the Savoyard Government en- 
joined the tenants not to pay to the prior. 
Whereupon that potentate declared that, 
being refused civil justice, he "fell back 
on the law of nations." 

The military resources of his realm were 
limited. He counted ten able-bodied sub- 
jects, but they were monks and not liable 
to service. The culverins of his uncle were 
gone, but he had six muskets — a loan from 
the city — and there were four pounds of 
powder in the magazine. But this was 
not of itself sufficient for a war against the 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 125 

Duke of Savoy. He must subsidize mer- 
cenaries. 

About this time there chanced to be at 
Geneva a swashbuckler from Berne, Bischel- 
bach by name, by trade a butcher, who 
had found the new regime of the Reform- 
ers at that city too straitlaced for his 
tastes and habits, and had come to Ge- 
neva, with some vagabonds at his heels, in 
search of adventures and a livelihood. Him 
did the prior of St. Victor, greatly im- 
pressed with his own accounts of his powers, 
commission as generalissimo of the forces. 
Second in command he set a priest, like- 
wise just thrown out of business by the 
Reformation in the North ; and in a council 
of war the plan of campaign was deter- 
mined. But before the actual clash of arms 
began, the solemn preliminaries usual be- 
tween hostile powers must be scrupulously 
fulfilled. A herald was commissioned to 
make proclamation in the name of the lord 
of St. Victor, through all the lands of 
Cartigny, that no man should venture to 
execute there any orders, whether of pope 
or duke, under penalty of being hung. This 
energetic procedure struck due terror, for 
when Bonivard's captain with several sol- 
diers appeared before the castle it capitu- 
lated without a blow. 



126 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

It was a brief though splendid victory. 
The very first raid in which the " Knights 
of the Spoon " — an association of neighbor- 
ing country gentlemen — harried that region 
they found that the capitain and entire 
garrison of the castle had gone to market 
(not without imputations of treason), leav- 
ing the post in charge of one woman, who 
promptly surrendered. 

The sovereign of St. Victor's blood was 
up. He resolved to draw, if need were, on 
the entire resources of his realm. The army 
was promptly reinforced to twenty men, 
and Bonivard took the field in person at 
the head of his forces. On what wise this 
array debouched in two corps d'armee one 
Sunday morning from two of the gates of 
Geneva ; how the junction of the forces 
was effected ; the military history of the 
march ; how they appeared, at last, before 
the castle of Cartigny — are these not writ- 
ten by the pen of the hero himself in his 
Chronicles of Geneva ? But Bonivard, 
though brave, was merciful. Willing to 
spare the effusion of blood, he sent the 
general-in-chief, Bischelbach, with his ser- 
vant Diebolt as an interpreter, to summon 
the castle. The answer was a shot that 
knocked poor Diebolt over with a mortal 
wound; whereupon the attacking army fell 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 127 

back in a masterly manner into the woods 
and made good their way into Geneva, 
bringing one prisoner, whom they had 
caught unarmed near the castle, and leav- 
ing Diebolt to die at a roadside inn. 

We may not further narrate the deeds of 
Bonivard as a martial hero, though they 
are neither few nor uninteresting.* But he 
is equally worthy of himself as a religious 
reformer. It was about this time that the 
stirrings of religious reformation at Berne 
and elsewhere began to be heard at Geneva, 
and the thought began to be seriously 
entertained by some of the patriotic " Sons 
of Geneva" that perhaps that liberty for 
which they had dared and suffered so much 
in vain might best come with that gospel 
which had wrought such wonders in other 
communities. There was one man who 
could advise them what to do ; and they 
went together over to the convent and 
sought audience and ghostly counsel of the 

* We have the history of one of them in a brief of Pope 
Clement VII. addressed to the chapter and senate of Ge- 
neva, in which he expresses his sorrow that in a city 
which he has carried in his bowels so long such high- 
handed doings should be allowed. One Francis Bonivard 
has not only despoiled the rightful prior of his living, but 
— what is worse— has chased his attorney with a gun and 
shot the horse that he was running away upon: " quodque 
peju$ est, Franciscum Tingum ejusdem electi procura- 
torem, negocium restitucionis dictce possessionis prose- 
quentem, scloppettis invasisse, etequum super quofugiebat 
vulnerasse." His Holiness threatens spiritual vengeance, 
and explains his zeal in the case by the fact that the ex- 
cluded prior is his cousin. 



128 THE REAL PRISONER OP CHILLON. 



prior. " We are going to have done with 
all popish ceremonies," said they, "and 
drive out the whole rabble-rout of papistry, 
monks, priests, and all : then we mean to 
send for gospel ministers to introduce the 
true Christian Reformation." It is pleasant 
to imagine the expression of Bonivard's 
countenance as he replied to his ardent 
friends: "It is a very praiseworthy idea. 
There is no doubt that all these ecclesiastics 
sadly need reformation. I am one of them 
myself. But who is to do the reforming ? 
Whoever it is, they had better begin opera- 
tions on themselves. If you are so fond of 
the gospel, why don't you practise it ? It 
looks as if you did not so much love the 
gospel as you hate us. And what do you 
hate us for ? It is not because we are so dif- 
ferent from you, but because we are so like. 
You say we are a licentious lot ; well, so 
are you. We drink hard ; so do you. We 
gamble and we swear; but what do you do, I 
should like to know? Why should you be 
so hard on us ? We don't interfere with 
your little enjoyments : for pity's sake, 
don't meddle with ours. You talk about 
driving us out and sending for the Lutheran 
ministers. Gentlemen, think twice before 
you do it. They will not have been here 
two years before you will wish they were 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 129 

gone. If you dislike us because we are too 
much like you, you will detest them be- 
cause they are so different from you. My 
friends, do one thing or the other. Either 
let us alone, or, if you must do some re- 
forming, try it on yourselves." 

Thus did this excellent pastor, in the 
spirit of the gospel injunction to count the 
cost, give spiritual counsel to those who 
sought reformation of the Church. "I 
warrant you," he wrote concerning them, 
" they went off with their tails between 
their legs. I am as fond of reformation 
as anybody, but I am a little scrupulous 
as to who shall take it in hand." * 

Bonivard's harum-scarum raids into the 
Duke of Savoy's dominions after rents or 
reprisals at last became so embarrassing to 
his Geneva friends that, much as they en- 
joyed the fun of them, it became necessary 
to say to the good monk that this sort of 
thing really must stop; and feeling the 
force of his argument, that he must have 
something to live on, the city council al- 
lowed its neighboring potentate a subven- 
tion of four crowns and a half monthly to 
enable him to keep up a state worthy of 
the dignity of a sovereign. He grumbled 
at the amount, but took it; and thereafter 

* Advis et Devis des difformes Reformateurz, pp. 149-151, 



130 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

the peace of Europe was less disturbed on 
his part. 

But bad news came to the gay prior in 
his impoverished monastery. His mother 
was ill at his old home at Seyssel in Savoy, 
and he must see her before she died. It 
was venturing into the tiger's den, as all 
his friends told him, and as he did not need 
to be told. But he thought he would ad- 
venture it if he could get a safe-conduct 
from the tiger. The matter was arranged : 
the duke sent Bonivard his passport, lim- 
ited to a single month; and the prior ar- 
rived at Seyssel, and nearly frightened the 
poor old lady out of her last breath with 
her sense of the peril to which he had ex- 
posed himself. 

Our hero's incomparable genius for 
getting himself into difficulties never shone 
more brightly than at this hour. While 
here in the country of his mortal enemy, 
on the last days of his expiring safe-con- 
duct, he got news of accusations gravely 
sustained at Geneva that he had gone over 
into Savoy to treat with the enemy. He 
did not dare to stay: he did not dare to go 
back. If he could get his safe-conduct ex- 
tended for one month, to the end of May, 
he would try to make his way through the 
Pays de Vaud (then belonging to Savoy) 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 131 

to Fribourg in the Swiss Confederation. 
The extension was granted, and with many 
assurances of good-will from friends of the 
duke he pushed on. It was a fine May 
morning, the 26th, that he was on his last 
day's journey to Lausanne, and passing 
through a pine wood. Suddenly men 
sprang from ambush upon Bonivard, who 
grasped his sword and spurred, calling to 
his guide, " Put spurs ! " But instead of 
so doing the guide turned and whipped out 
his knife and cut Bonivard's sword-belt; 
"Whereupon these worthy gentlemen," 
says Bonivard's Chronicle, "jumped on me 
and took me prisoner in the name of my 
lord duke." Safe-conducts were in vain. 
A bagful of ropes was produced, and he 
was carried on a mule, bound hand and 
foot, in secrecy, to the duke's castle of 
Chillon, the captain of which was one of 
the ambuscading party. For six years he 
was hidden from the world, and at first 
men knew not whether he was alive or 
dead. But his sufferings at the hand of 
the common foe put to shame the suspicions 
that had been engendered at Geneva, and 
it is recorded, to the honor of the Genevese, 
that during all that period, whenever 
negotiations were opened between them 
and the Duke of Savoy, the liberation of 



132 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

Bonivard was always insisted on as one of 
the conditions. 

The story of the imprisonment is soon 
told; for, strangely enough, this most gar- 
rulously egotistical of writers never alludes 
to it but twice, and then briefly. The first 
two years he was kept in the upper cham- 
bers of the castle and treated kindly, but 
at the end of this time the castle received 
a visit from the duke, and from that time 
forth the Prisoner of Chillon was remanded 
to the awful and sombre crypt. A single 
sentence in his handwriting is all that he 
tells us of this period, of which he might 
have told so much, and in this he shows a 
disposition to look at the affair rather in its 
humorous than its Byronesque aspect. 
For his one recorded reminiscence of his 
four years of dungeon-life is, that " he had 
such abundant leisure for promenading 
that he wore in the rock pavement a little 
path as neatly as if it had been done with 
a stone-hammer." * 

* It is needful to caution enthusiastic tourists that 
nearly all the details of Byron's poem are fabulous. The 
two brothers, the martyred father, the anguish of the 
prisoner, were all invented by the poet on that rainy day 
in the tavern at Ouchy. Even the level of the dungeon, 
below the water of the lake, turns out to be a mistake, 
although Bonivard believed it: the floor of the crypt is 
eight feet above high-water mark. As for the thoughts 
of the prisoner, they seem to have been mainly occupied 
with making Latin and French verses of an objectionable 
sort not adapted for general publication. (See Ls. Vul- 
liemin: Ghitton, Etude historique, Lausanne, 1851.) 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 133 

One March morning in 1536 the Prisoner 
of Chillon heard through the windows of 
his dungeon the sound of a caononade by- 
land and lake. It was the army of Berne, 
which was finishing its victorious campaign 
through the Pays de Vaud by the siege of 
the duke's last remaining stronghold, the 
castle of Chillon. They were joyfully 
aided by a flotilla fitted out by Geneva, 
which had never forgotten its old friend. 
That night the dungeon-door was burst 
open, and Bonivard and three fellow-pris- 
oners were carried off in triumph to Geneva. 

Not Rip Van Winkle when he awoke 
from his long slumber in the Catskills, not 
the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus when they 
came back from their sepulchre and found 
their city Christian, had a better right to 
be surprised than the prior of St. Victor 
when he got back to Geneva. Duke and 
bishop and all their functionaries were ex- 
pelled; priests and preaching-friars were 
gone; the mass was abolished; in thecathe* 
dral of St. Peter's and all the lesser churches, 
which had been cleared of their images, 
there were singing of psalms and preaching 
of fiery sermons by Reformers from France; 
and the streets through which he had 
sometimes had to move by stealth were 
filled with joyous crowds to hail him as a 



134 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

martyr. St. Victor was no more. If he 
went to look for his old home, he found a 
heap of rubbish, for all the suburbs of the 
city that might give shelter to an enemy 
had been torn down by the unsparing 
patriots of Geneva, and the trees had been 
felled. The joyous city had ceased, and 
Bonivard's prophecy to his roystering com- 
panions was not long in being fulfilled for 
himself as well as for them: they soon 
found Calvin's little finger to be heavier 
than the bishop's loins. 

And yet the heroic little town showed a 
noble gratitude towards the old friendof its 
liberties. The house which he chose out 
of all the city was given him for his own 
and furnished at the public expense. A 
pension of two hundred crowns a year in 
gold was settled on him, and he was made 
a senator of the republic. To all which 
was added a condition that he should lead 
a respectable life — a proviso which is prac- 
tically explained in the very next appear- 
ance of his name in the records on account 
of a misdemeanor for which his accomplice 
was ordered to quit the town withiu three 
days. 

The more generous was the town the 
more exacting became the Martyr. He 
could not get over his free-and-easy way 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 135 

of living in the gay old days when the 
tithes of his benefice yielded him nigh a 
thousand yellow crowns a year. He could 
not see why he was not entitled to have 
his rents back again; and after a vain ef- 
fort on the part of the council to make him 
see it, he went off to Berne, where he had 
been admitted a citizen, to ask it to inter- 
fere for him, sending back an impudent 
letter renouncing his Geneva citizenship, 
on the ground that in his reduced circum- 
stances he could not afford to be a citizen 
in two places at once. For a while the 
patient city lost its patience with its unruly 
beneficiary, but the genuine grateful and 
kindly feeling that every one felt for the 
poor fellow, and the general admiration for 
his learning and wit, conspired with his 
growing embarrassments to bring about a 
settlement of the affair on the basis of a 
reduced pension with a round lump sum to 
pay his debts. 

They sent for him two or three years 
later to come to Geneva as historiographer, 
and he came, bringing with him a wife from 
Berne, who died soon after his arrival. 
For a man of his years, he had a remark- 
able alacrity at getting married, and his 
second venture was an unlucky one. For 
from the wedding-day onward, when he 



136 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

was not before the council with some quar- 
rel or some affair of debt, he was apt to 
come before it to get them to compel his 
wife to live with him, or, failing that, to 
get her money to live on himself. What 
time could be saved from these wranglings, 
which lasted almost till the poor woman's 
death, was devoted ardently to his liter- 
ary work. The history grew apace, and 
other books besides. In the seditions of 
the Libertine party against the austerities 
of the new regime the old man took the 
side of law and order and good morals in 
his book on Eancienne et noavelle Police 
de Geneve, with an ardor that was the 
more surprising as one remembered his 
antecedents. In the midst of his toils he 
found time to get married to a third wife 
and to go to law with his neighbors. He 
is continually coming to the council, some- 
times for a little loan to help him with his 
lawsuits, sometimes for relief in his embar- 
rassments. It is touching to see how ten- 
der they are towards the poor foolish old 
man. They make him little grants from 
time to time, always looking to it that 
their money shall be applied to the object 
designated, and not "on his fantasies." 
They take up one of his notes for him, look- 
ing to see that it has not been tampered with 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 137 

because " he is easily circumvented and not 
adroit in his business." He complains of 
the heat during an illness one summer, and 
the seigneurie give him the White Chamber 
in the town-hall, and when winter comes 
on and he is old, and infirm, they assign 
him the lodging lately occupied by Ma- 
thurin Cordier (famous schoolmaster Cor- 
derius, whose Dialogues were the first 
book in Latin of our grandfathers), because 
it contained a stove— a rare luxury. He 
thanks them for their kindness as his fathers, 
and makes them heirs of his library and 
manuscripts. 

There was another and more solemn 
assemblage, his relations with which were 
less tender. This was the consistory of 
the Church, which found it less easy to 
allow for the old man's infirmities. His 
first appearance before this body was under 
accusation of playing at dice with Clement 
Marot, another famous character and the 
sweet singer of the French Reformation. 
He comes next time of his own accord, 
asking the venerable brethren to interfere 
because his second wife ran away from him 
on their wedding-day, she defending her- 
self on the ground of a bad cold. His 
domestic troubles bring him hither so of ten 
as to put the clergy out of patience. He 



138 THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 

is called up for beating his wife, but shows 
that the discipline was needed, and she is 
admonished to be more obedient in future. 
Later on he is questioned why he does not 
come to church. He can't walk, is the 
answer. But he is told that if he can get 
himself carried to the hotel de vilie to see 
the new carvings, he could get carried to 
church. And why does he neglect the 
communion ? Answer : He has been de- 
barred from it. "Then present your re- 
quest to be restored." So the poor old 
gentleman presents himself six weeks later, 
asking to be readmitted to the Church ; 
which is granted, but with the remark, 
entered on the record, that he " does not 
show much contrition in coming with a 
bunch of flowers over his ear — a thing very 
unbecoming in a man of his years." 

The dreadful consistory had a principal 
concern in the affair that darkened the de- 
clining days of Bonivard with the shadow 
of a tragedy. An escaped nun had found 
refuge in his lodgings after his third wife's 
death ; and after some love-making — on 
which side was disputed — there was a 
promise of marriage given by him, which, 
however, he was in no hurry to fulfil. The 
consistory deemed it best to interfere, in 
the interests of propriety, and insist on the 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 139 

marriage ; and the decrepit old invalid in 
vain pleaded his age and bodily infirmities. 
So he was married in spite of himself to 
his nun, and showed his disposition to 
make the best of it by making her a wed- 
ding-present of his new Latin treatise, just 
finished, on The Origin of Evil, and re- 
ceiving in tender return a Greek copy of 
the Philippics of Demosthenes. Three 
years later the wretched woman was ac- 
cused of adultery, and being put to the 
torture confessed her crime and was 
drowned in a sack, while her paramour was 
beheaded. Bonivard, being questioned, 
declared his belief of her innocence, and 
that her worst faults were that she wanted 
to make him too pious, and tormented him 
to begin preaching, and sometimes beat 
him when he had a few friends in to 
drink.* 

For five years after this catastrophe the 
old man lingered, tended by hirelings, but 
watched with filial gratitude by the little 
state whose liberties he had helped to save, 
and whose heroic history he has recorded. 

* This touching' tribute of conjugal affection is all the 
more honorable to Bonivard from the fact that this 
wife, like the others, had provoked him. Only a few 
months before he had been compelled to appear before 
the consistory to answer for treating her in a public place 
with profane and abusive language, applying to her some 
French term which is expressed in the record only by 
abbreviations. 



140 THE REAL PRISONER OP CHILLON. 

He had at least the conifort of having fin- 
ished that great work ; and when he 
brought the manuscript of it to the coun- 
cil, they referred it to a committee with 
Master Calvin at the head ; who reported 
that it was written in a rude and familiar 
style, quite beneath the dignity of history, 
and that for this and other reasons it 
had better not be printed. The precious 
manuscript was laid on the shelf until in 
the lapse of years it was found that the 
very reasons why those solemn critics re- 
jected it were the things that gave it 
supreme value to a later age. It has been 
the pride of Geneva scholars to print in 
elegant archaic style every page written 
by the Prisoner of Chillon in prose or verse, 
on history, polity, philology and theology.* 

* Like every subject relating' to the history of Geneva, 
the life of Bonivard has been thoroughly studied by local 
antiquarians and historians. The most important work 
on the subject is that of Dr. Chaponni&re, before cited ; 
this is reprinted (but without the documents attached) as 
a preface to the new edition of the Chronicles. M. Edmond 
Chevrier, in a slight pamphlet (Macon, 1868), gives a criti- 
cal account both of the man and of his writings. Besides 
these may be named Vulliemin : Chillon Etude historique, 
Lausanne, 1851 ; J. Gaberel : Le Chateau de Chillon et 
Bonivard, Geneva. Marc Monnier, Geneve et ses Poetes 
(Geneva, 1847), gives an excellent criticism on Bonivard as 
author. For original materials consult besides the work 
of Chaponniere) Galiffe : Materiaux pour VHiafoire de 
Geneve, and Cramer; Notes extraites des Registres du 
Consistoire, a rare book in lithography (Geneva, 1853). 
A weak little article in the Catholic World for September, 
1876, bravely attacks Bonivard as " one of the Protestant 
models of virtue," and triumphantly proves him to have 
been far from perfect. The charge, however, that he was 
' a traitor to his ecclesiastical character, 1 ' and " quitted 



THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON. 141 

Somewhere about September, 1570, Fran- 
cis Bonivard died, aged seventy-seven, 
lonely and childless, leaving the city his 
heir. The cherished collection of books 
that was the comfort of his harassed life 
has grown into the library of a university, 
and the little walled town for whose 
ancient liberties he ventured such perils 
and suffered such imprisonment is, and for 
the three hundred years since has been, 
one of the chief radiant centres of light 
and liberty for all the world. 

his convent and broke his vows," is founded on a blunder. 
Bonivard never took monastic vows or holy orders, but 
held his living- in commendam, as a layman. The main 
resource, however, for Bonivard's life up to his liberation 
from Chillon is in his own works, especially the Chronicles 
(Geneva, edition Fick, 1867). 



WM. LLOYD GARRISON 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 



Haying frequent occasion, in the prose- 
cution of certain historical studies, to refer 
to the voluminous biography of Mr. Gar- 
rison, written by two of his sons,* we find 
the question again and again recurring : 
What idea of the man and his times would 
be got from these volumes by one who had 
no other source of information ? 

It is a question not altogether easy to 
answer off-hand. Doubtless the idea would 
be somewhat confused at first ; but being 
allowed to settle and clarify itself, after 
some cancelling of contradictions and elim- 
inating of impossibilities, it would come 
out somewhat in this shape : 

Mr. Garrison was a man of meek, gentle 
and affectionate spirit, and wholly blame- 
less character, who devoted himself at an 
early age, with absolute unselfishness, to 
universal philanthropy, and especially to 
the abolition of slavery. Beginning this 
work with a nearly unanimous public sen- 
timent on his side, he pushed it forward 

* " William Lloyd Garrison : 1805-1879. The Story of his 
Life told by his Children." New York : The Century Co. 
1885, 1889. 



146 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

with such boldness, ability, tact and dis- 
cretion, that by the end of fifteen years he 
had brought the public opinion of the na- 
tion, both South and North, into almost 
equally unanimous antagonism to himself. 
Particularly was this true of the Christian 
Church and ministry in America, who had 
shown him hearty sympathy at first ; but 
many of whom, including men who are even 
yet held in the highest veneration and love, 
actually engaged in active opposition to 
slavery with the nefarious purpose of 
thereby sustaining that wicked institution; 
and when Mr. Garrison, in the simple ful- 
filment of his duty, rebuked such conduct, 
they abused him, the gentle Garrison, with 
vituperative language. This conspiracy of 
the entire Christian Church against him, 
simply for his superior righteousness, was 
only exceeded in wickedness by the abom- 
inable conduct of many of his nearest 
friends and benefactors and most self-sac- 
rificing fellow-laborers, who had the hardi- 
hood to separate from his Society, and set 
up another society and newspaper which 
they called anti-slavery, but which the 
acumen of Mr. Garrison at once recognized 
as " the worst form of pro-slavery." Thus, 
deserted and betrayed by men whom for 
years he had extolled as among the noblest 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 147 

of the human race, he was publicly de- 
clared at last, by one of his few remaining 
adherents, to be " the only righteous in a 
world perverse." 

In nothing was this good man's abhor- 
rence of slavery more shiningly illustrated 
than in his rejection of any slavish bond- 
age to his own consistency. At some 
periods in his career he was a gradual 
abolitionist, a gradual emancipationist, a 
colonizationist, in favor of compensated 
emancipation, devoted to the Constitution 
of the United States, inculcating the exer- 
cise of citizenship, and maintaining a nar- 
row and rigid Sabbatarianism. He had 
held these views in the simplicity and in- 
nocence of his heart ; but such was the 
wild and swift degeneracy of the age and 
people, that after he laid them down, they 
were never afterwards held by anybody 
else, except with vile insincerity, by patent 
fallacy, with abominable motives, for atro- 
cious ends. 

His methods as a reformer were original 
almost to the point of paradox. He had 
two main objects : 1, Immediate emanci- 
pation of slaves by their holders ; 2, im- 
mediate abolition of slavery by the repeal 
of the slave code. The first was sought by 
a style of address to the slaveholders that 



148 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

enraged every man of them against him 
and his views to the utmost fury. The 
second was to be achieved by persuading 
all opponents of slavery into abdicating 
their rights and powers as citizens, and so 
committing the control of legislation ex- 
clusively to the upholders of that iniqui- 
tous system. But in the prosecution of thi,s 
bold and energetic policy, the good Garri- 
son was sadly hindered by the criminal 
folly of those who thought that one good 
way to oppose bad laws in a republic was 
to vote against them, and who thus com- 
mitted themselves to " the worst and most 
dangerous form of pro-slavery." 

But nothing in all this good man's career 
was so wonderful as his success. At last, 
by the power of his "sweet reasonable- 
ness," he so far won the people of the free 
States to sympathy with his abhorrence of 
the Constitution and Union of the United 
States and his sense of the sinfulness of 
voting, that they formed a great political 
party in which every principle character- 
istic of Mr. Garrison was repudiated, and 
fought out at the polls the old issue, that 
was old when Garrison was a baby. But 
his greatest triumph was when his peace 
and non-resistance principles had gained 
such a hold over the popular mind, that at 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 149 

last a million of men stood in arms and 
entered into the bloodiest war of recent 
times for the maintenance of the Union and 
Constitution which Mr. Garrison detested 
— a war in which every death was held by 
him to be a wicked murder, and the inci- 
dental result of which was the abolition of 
slavery. 

It was a fitting close to this triumphant 
career, that when he had accomplished his 
great work, he for himself and his family 
and friends in his behalf, should step 
promptly forward as they have, to accept 
for him the homage due to successful and 
humane achievement. 

Such is the paradoxical, but filially pious 
portraiture of Mr. Garrison given in these 
volumes. The hero of them is depicted as 
a noble and wholly faultless character, of 
whom the world was not worthy. Indeed 
it is hardly so much the worthiness of the 
hero as the world's unworthiness of him 
that most impresses the reader's mind. One 
who reads believing is shocked, from page 
to page, with growing proofs of the utter 
debasement and turpitude of the generation 
in which he lived, especially of those who 
pass for the best men of it ; and with the 
vile perfidy towards Mr. Garrison of such 
large numbers of those who came into in- 



150 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

timate relations with him, in business, in 
reform-agitation, and in personal friend- 
ship. 

No trait of Mr. Garrison's character is 
more emphasized and illustrated by his 
biographers than his singular equanimity, 
self-control and gentleness of temper. His 
mildness of manner and expression are the 
theme of repeated and admiring comment; 
and it is demonstrated, not boastfully per- 
haps, but with evident pride, that his re- 
markable composure, in circumstances 
which to most men would have been ex- 
citing to the last degree, was due not to self- 
control, but to the actual absence of excite- 
ment. Contrariwise to the public impres- 
sion of him, he was not a man of hasty or 
irritable temper, or given to grudges or 
evil thoughts of others, but one who 
cherished not merely a doctrine of non-re- 
sistance, but actual kindly feelings towards 
bitter enemies. And yet, as we read, we 
do come upon language of his that has a 
different sound. For instance, in a long 
article on the remonstrances of some of his 
best friends and fellow-reformers against 
what they deemed the harshness and se- 
verity of his language, he says : 

"The same cuckoo cry is raised against me 
now as I heard when I stood forth alone ; and 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 151 

the same sagacious predictions and grave admo- 
nitions are uttered now as were then spoken 
with the infallibility of ignorance, the disin- 
terestedness of cowardice, and the prudence of 
imbecility. There are many calling themselves 
anti-slavery men who, because they are only 
' half-fledged ' themselves, and have neither 
the strength nor the courage to soar, must needs 
flutter and scream because my spirit will not 
stoop in its flight heavenward, and come down 
to their filthy nest."— [Vol. I. 459, 460.] 

Improving upon this pleasing metaphor, 
he characterizes the General Conference of 
the Methodist Church as " a cage of un- 
clean birds, and synagogue of Satan." 
[II. 78.] The action of the Consociation 
of Rhode Island in declining to entertain a 
memorial from an epicene convention in 
Boston is declared to be " clerical ruffian- 
ism." [II. 220, 7i.] And the Rev. Charles 
T. Torrey, who not long after died a martyr 
to his anti-slavery convictions in the Balti- 
more jail, but who had been guilty of the 
"sedition" (so Mr. Garrison termed it) 
of desiring another Society and another 
journal than Garrison's is described as 
coming in "the full tide of his priestly 
bile." [11.270.] We have these occasional 
specimens of a style of expression which in 
most men would be indicative of anger, or 
hatred, or some evil passion, although in 



152 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

this book no evidence appears, except in 
expressions of shame, disgust and heart- 
sickness on the part of many of Garrison's 
best friends, that his habitual style was 
that of the most brutally vituperative writer 
of his time. And yet the testimony, both 
of himself and of others who knew him, is 
that he was a man of exceptional mildness 
and gentleness of temper. What solution 
can be found for so strange a paradox ? 

That which is suggested by one of his 
admiring friends and cited by his biogra- 
phers, seems not improbable. Miss Harriet 
Martineau, in 1835, found his countenance 
to be 

" wholly expressive of purity, animation and 
gentleness." "His conversation . . . is of 
the most practical cast. . . . Sagacity is the 
most striking attribute of his conversation. It 
has none of the severity, the harshness, the bad 
taste of his writing ; it is as gladsome as his 
countenance, and as gentle as his voice. Through 
the whole of his deportment breathes the evi- 
dence of a heart at ease. ... I do not pre- 
tend to like or to approve the tone of Garrison's 
printed censures. I could not use such language 
myself towards any class of offenders, nor can 
I sympathize in its use by others. But it is only 
fair to mention that Garrison adopts it warily; 
and that I am persuaded that he is elevated 
above passion and has no unrighteous anger to 
vent in harsh expressions. . . . He gives his 
reasons for his severity with a calmness, meek- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 153 

ness and softness which contrast strongly with 
the subject of the discourse, and which convince 
the objector that there is principle at the bot- 
tom of the practice."— [II. 70-71.] 

It seems a hard thing for sons to have 
to say of a father whom they love and 
venerate, and yet it seems to be true, that 
the frenzied and unbridled scurrility of 
Garrison's polemic, such as might be ex- 
tenuated, not excused, on the ground of 
irritated feeling or excited passion, was 
really adopted by him " warily," without a 
particle of animosity, in cold blood, as a 
matter of policy for the accomplishment 
of a purpose. There was no noble and 
irrepressible rage in it. His feelings never 
ran away with him, no matter how diabol- 
ical the wickedness that confronted him. A 
very striking illustration of this self-com- 
mand is presented in these volumes. On 
the subject of liquor-selling, said he, in 
1829 : 

" We who are somewhat impetuous in our dis- 
position and singular in our notions of reform — 
who are so uncharitable as to make no distinc- 
tion between men engaged in one common traf- 
fic, which shall excuse the destroyer of thou- 
sands and heap contumely on the murderer of a 
dozen — we demand that the whole truth be told 
on all occasions, whether it induces persecution 
or occasions a breach of private friendship. . . . 
If it be injurious, or criminal, or dangerous, or 



154 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

disreputable to drink ardent spirits, it is far 
more so to vend, or distil, or import this liquid 
fire. ' Woe unto him who putteth the cup to 
his neighbor's lips'— who increases his wealth 
at the expense of the bodies and souls of men 
— who takes away the bread of the poor and 
devours the earnings of industry — who scat- 
ters his poison through the veins and arte- 
ries of the community, till even the grave is 
burdened with his victims ! Against him must 
the artillery of public indignation be brought to 
bear ; and the decree must go forth, as from the 
lips of Jehovah, that he who will deal in the 
accursed article can lay no claim to honesty of 
purpose or holiness of life, but is a shameless 
enemy to the happiness and prosperity of his 
fellow-creatures."— [I. 155, 156.] 

"He looked upon 'every distiller or vender 
of ardent spirits ' as ' a poisoner of the health and 
morals of community ' ; and could even say, in 
his address in 1832 before the second annual Con- 
vention of the People of Color in Philadelphia : 
1 God is my witness that great as is my detesta- 
tion of slavery and the foreign slave trade, I 
had rather be a slaveholder — yea, a kidnapper 
on the African coast — than sell this poison to 
my fellow-creatures for common consump- 
tion.'"— [I. 268.] 

This was in 1832. In 1833, this uncom- 
promising reformer, burning with holy in- 
dignation, had the golden opportunity of 
confronting, in the midst of his ill-gotten 
and blood-stained wealth, one of the most 
notorious of these monsters, more detest- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARFISON. 155 

able than the slaveholder and the kidnap- 
per, these murderers and public poisoners, 
of whom he was resolved to speak the 
truth on all occasions however embarrass- 
ing. It was a peculiarly flagrant case, for 
the caitiff wretch had not only openly 
made and sold his liquid damnation, but 
had commended it to his neighbors' lips in 
that seductive form known as Buxton's 
Entire ; and nevertheless, was holding a 
high position in the public esteem, and 
giving himself the airs of a philanthropist 
and reformer and Christian. In all Mr. 
Garrison's stormy career, he never had so 
good an opportunity for unlimbering the 
" artillery of indignation " for a point-blank 
shot. But instead of this he speaks with 
undisguised delight of a " polite invitation 
by letter" from this ogre "to take breakfast 
with him" ; on which occasion our reform - 
er,instead of warning his host of the hypoc- 
risy of his "claim of honesty of purpose 
or holiness of life " and faithfully denounc- 
ing him as the "shameless enemy of his 
fellow-creatures," accepted his breakfast 
and his compliments without a syllable of 
protest ; and after returning to America, 
described him as " the worthy successor of 
"Wilberforce, our esteemed friend and coad- 
jutor, Thomas Fowell Buxton," and declares 



156 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

that, aside from a single mistake of anti- 
slavery policy, " Mr. Buxton deserves uni- 
versal admiration and gratitude for his long- 
continued, able and disinterested efforts, 
amidst severe ridicule and malignant op- 
position, to break every yoke and set the 
oppressed free."— [I. 351, 352.] 

Miss Martineau was right. The spirit of 
the prophet was completely subject unto 
the prophet. He was able to restrain the 
fury of his indignation against this mon- 
strous criminal, and devote all his energies, 
in England, to hounding, pestering and 
abusing the agent of a benevolent enter- 
prise, of which less than four years before, 
Garrison himself had been an extravagant 
eulogist. The Colonization agent was guilty 
of not keeping up with Garrison in the 
nimble changes of his mind from love to 
hate ; and this was a crime as much worse 
than Buxton's as Buxton's was worse than 
that of the slaveholder and the kidnapper. 
But let it not be supposed that even this 
badgering of the Colonization agent was a 
matter of indignation. As Miss Martineau 
perceived, it was only " sagacity " — part of 
a course "adopted warily," and on "prin- 
ciple " — a course disgusting enough to her, 
as well as to Whittier, and Follen, and the 
Tappans, and many others, but which never- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 157 

theless, as he calmly explained, with " glad- 
some countenance " and " gentle voice," had 
to be pursued as a matter of policy. 

It is not impossible to comprehend the 
situation in which Mr. Garrison felt him- 
self drawn or driven to this disgraceful 
policy. We must remember how scanty were 
the resources not only material and social, 
but intellectual, with which he entered on 
his crusade. He was a decidedly bright 
young fellow, who had worked his way up 
from printer's boy to editor — wrote in a 
fairly good English style, with a knack for 
turning a sonnet which now and then rose 
to the dignity of real poetry. But he lack- 
ed intellectual strength, and was conscious 
of the lack. The reader of this book is im- 
pressed, in the pages from Garrison's pen, 
with the absence of genuine eloquence, or 
vigor of argument, or acuteness of observa- 
tion. A superiority of intellectual and 
moral tone is recognized at once, when we 
pass from a page of Garrison's writing to 
a page from Elizur Wright, or even Lewis 
Tappan. Now, what do most men do in 
this case — conscious that their strength is 
inadequate to their undertaking ? They 
are commonly tempted to make up in vio- 
lence for the defect of strength. And this 
was the temptation to which Garrison 



158 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

yielded. He was always straining his voice 
till it broke into falsetto. He might not 
be able to argue successfully; but he could 
scold like a fishwife. He might not con- 
vict his adversary of wrong; but he could 
pelt him with hard names. He might not 
be able to command the attention of the 
people by weight of character or power of 
language; but he could infuriate them by 
insult. Here were cheap substitutes for 
eloquence always at hand, and he had 
small scruple about using them. He might 
not be able to win any large following to 
serve under him by the attraction of his 
genius, or the success of his leadership; but 
perhaps some might be intimidated into 
his service by a policy of systematic insult. 
So this policy was deliberately adopted 
and persistently followed. Probably it was 
the first instance of an attempt to carry 
forward a scheme of Christian philanthropy 
in main reliance on blackmail. The bitter- 
est epithets and most damaging accusations 
in Mr. Garrison's extensive repertory were 
applied to these who were nearest him but 
failed to adhere to him. The one lower 
grade of turpitude was that of the men 
who, having once trained in his troop, de- 
tached themselves from it. The "worst 
and most dangerous form of pro-slavery " 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 159 

was to be an anti -slavery man outside of 
Garrison's residuary faction. There was 
no lack of collaborators to whom the policy 
of Garrison was congenial, and it was in- 
dustriously prosecuted. Faithful citizens, 
and especially Christian ministers, were 
studiously annoyed with false charges of 
being "pro-slavery." Americans going 
abroad found that a system of correspon- 
dence was in operation by which evil re- 
ports were sent in advance of them. But 
the delight of the Garrison press and plat- 
form was to seize the occasion of the 
recent death of some exceptionally beloved 
and honored citizen, when hearts were 
tender, and the wounds of bereavement 
not yet closed, to defile his fresh grave with 
some abominable accusation. And down 
almost to this very day it has been the 
amiable practice of some of the survivors 
of that faction, notably of Mr. Oliver 
Johnson, to signalize the departure of some 
man honored for his great services in the 
cause of human freedom, by printing men- 
dacious charges against him of pro-slavery 
sympathy, and sending them marked to 
the mourners. 

It is only by glimpses between the lines 
that the reader of this biography gets an 
idea of the state of public sentiment in 



160 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

America at the time when Garrison began 
his work. Garrison's own reckless and 
swaggering account of it is this: 

"At that time [before the beginning of The 
Liberator in 1831] there was scarcely a man in 
all the land who dared to peep or mutter on the 
subject of slavery; the pulpit and the press 
were dumb ; no anti-slavery organizations were 
made ; no public addresses were delivered ; no 
reproofs, no warnings, no entreaties were uttered 
in the ears of the people, silence, almost un- 
broken silence, prevailed universally." — [I. 458.] 

In the same ridiculously false and brag- 
gart tone is his talk about Channing's little 
work on slavery : " We do claim all that is 
sound or valuable in the book as our own; 
its sole excellences are its moral plagiar- 
isms; " — [II. 89], Habitually, he abounds 
with great swelling words of assumption 
that he is the very founder and inventor of 
anti-slavery feeling, argument and effort. 

And yet throughout the book, and es- 
pecially the earlier part of it, we come con- 
tinually upon facts that are only to be 
explained by supposing (what is the demon- 
strable truth) that Garrison from his child- 
hood grew up in an atmosphere of abhor- 
rence of slavery — an atmosphere which 
pervaded the North and, to a large ex- 
tent the South as well. The really remark- 
able and distinguishing thing about his 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 161 

early life is the torpid insensibility of his 
own conscience on this subject, while all 
about him men were feeling deeply and 
speaking and acting boldly. He had had 
exceptional opportunities of knowing sla- 
very in its most hideous aspect, in succes- 
sive visits to one of the chief slave markets 
of the country; but he took no interest in 
the matter. In the year 1826, a speech was 
made in Congress by Mr. Everett, which 
seemed to apologize for slavery; Mr. 
Gurley, of the Colonization Society, Mr. 
Bacon, and other friends of the colored 
people broke out in indignant protest and 
denunciation ; Mr. Garrison copied the 
speech into his newspaper without the 
slightest sign of disapproval. 

When, at last, his sluggish conscience 
was roused to recognize that slavery was 
wrong, and he began to speak and act, he 
found that the whole country was before- 
hand with him. In the year 1828, he refers, 
in his Bennington newspaper, to a petition 
recently presented to Congress by more 
than a thousand residents of the District of 
Columbia, including all the District Judges, 
praying for the abolition of slavery in the 
District. And presently a meeting is con- 
vened at the Bennington Academy at 
which a petition for the same object, drawn 



162 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 



by Garrison's hand, is read and adopted, 
which reads : 

" Your petitioners deem it unnecessary to at- 
tempt to maintain by elaborate arguments that 
the existence of slavery is highly detrimental to 
the happiness, peace and prosperity of that na- 
tion in whose bosom and under whose auspices 
it is nourished ; and especially that it is incon- 
sistent with the spirit of our government and 
laws. All this is readily admitted by every 
patriot and Cliristian. ... It is gratifying to 
believe that a large majority of the inhabitants 
of the District, and also of our more Southern 
brethren, are earnest for the abolition. . . . 
Your petitioners deem it preposterous that 
while there is one half of the States in which 
slavery does not exist, and while a large majority 
of our white population are desirous of seeing 
it extirpated, this evil is suffered to canker in 
the vitals of the republic." 

The petition was sent to all the post- 
masters of the State of Vermont, with the 
request that they would obtain signatures 
to it; and most of them "responded nobly" ; 
so that the document was sent to Washing- 
ton with no less than 2352 signatures, and 
there found a nearly unanimous resolu- 
tion of the Pennsylvania House of Repre- 
sentatives in favor of the same object. — 
[I. 109, 110.] 

It is this exact period of which it is im- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 1C3 

pudently declared (for the greater glory of 
Garrison) : 

" Fifty years ago [i. e., in 1829], it is no ex- 
aggeration to say, this nation, in church and 
state, from President to boot-black— I mean the 
white boot-black — was thoroughly pro-slavery. 
In the Sodom there might have been a Lot or 
two here and there — some profound thinker who 
wished justice to be done though the heavens 
should fall, but he was despondent. It seemed 
as though nearly the whole business of the 
press, the pulpit and the theological seminary 
was to reconcile the people to the permanent 
degradation and slavery of the negro race."~ 
[I. 298. Quoted from a speech of Elizur Wright, 
in June, 1879.] 

Who would suppose, from reading this 
statement of history, that Garrison's boy- 
hood had passed in the midst of an anti- 
slavery agitation that convulsed the nation 
almost to the point of civil war; or that in 
1818 that noble act of the Presbyterian 
Church declaring slavery to be "a gross 
violation of the most precious and sacred 
rights of human nature, utterly inconsistent 
with the law of God, and totally irreconcil- 
able with the spirit and principles of the 
gospel of Christ," had been unanimously 
adopted by the General Assembly, repre- 
senting North and South ? The eulogists 
of Garrison will hardly have the effrontery 
to claim that it was from their hero that 



164 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

the illustrious Kentuckian, Robert J. 
Breckenridge, learned either the ethics or 
the rhetoric of that splendid invective 
which he uttered in 1833 in the pages of 
the " Biblical Repertory," in which he de- 
clared " slavery as it is daily exhibited in 
every slave State " to be " a system which 
is utterly indefensible on every correct 
human principle, and utterly abhorrent 
from every law of God"; in which rebuk- 
ing the apologists of the institution he ex- 
claims : " Out upon such folly ! The man 
who cannot see that involuntary domestic 
slavery, as it exists among us, is founded 
on the principle of taking by force that 
which is another's, has simply no moral 
sense"; . . . " these are reasons for a 
Christian land to look upon and then ask : 
Can any system which they are advanced 
to defend be compatible with virtue and 
truth? . . . Hereditary slavery is with- 
out pretence, except in avowed rapacity." 

Such views as these, of a conspicuous 
leader of public opinion in the slave States 
in 1833, instead of being, according to the 
preposterous assumption of Mr. Garrison's 
admirers, something unknown before his 
advent, devised by his own heart, becom- 
ing prevalent through his propagation of 
them, were, as a matter of exact history, the 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 165 

generally prevalent sentiment of the coun- 
try at the beginning of his career ; and 
the progressive decline of them, and, at 
the South, the practical extinction of 
them, synchronizes with the progress of 
Mr. Garrison's anti-slavery operations. 
Whether these operations stood to the de- 
cline of anti-slavery sentiment in the re- 
lation of cause to effect is a fair question, 
on which, however, in our own minds, there 
is not a particle of doubt. It is clear to 
us that Mr. Garrison and his propaganda 
had no small part in the demoralization of 
public opinion which went on to worse and 
worse during the period of his greatest 
activity. 

But while he had no originality in the 
advocacy of anti-slavery, of emancipation, 
or of abolition — on all these points merely 
accepting the general sentiment of good 
men prevalent at the beginning of his 
career — there were two favorite nostrums 
on which he claimed exclusive rights, at 
least for the American market ; one of these 
he labelled "immediate emancipation," and 
the other "immediate abolition." Both of 
them were founded in fallacy — that form of 
fallacy which one of his surviving disci- 
ples, Mr. Oliver Johnson, with unconscious 



166 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

humor, characterized * as " elastic defini- 
tion," but which is better known to logicians 
as "ambiguous middle." All slavehold- 
ing is wicked, said the reformer ; therefore 
every slaveholder should instantly eman- 
cipate all his slaves, and until he does so, 
he is a murderer, a man-stealer, a pirate, 
to be excommunicated from the Church, 
and shunned by decent men. But being 
questioned what he would do in the case 
of one who was holding slaves only until 
he could bring them away to a State where 
the laws would permit the emancipation of 
them, he answers at once: "When I say 
slaveholding is wicked, I mean the wicked 
kind of slaveholding ; the man you de- 
scribe holds slaves, indeed, but he is not 
what I mean by a slaveholder. I have 'an 
elastic definition ' that can be accommo- 
dated to all such cases." In short, he fell 
afoul of the English language ; his long 
quarrel with the best men of his generation 
was a contest in defence of his indefeasible 
right to use words out of their proper 
meaning. 

So with his demand for " immediate ab- 
olition," objection to which filled him with 
"inexpressible abhorrence and dismay." 
It "does not mean," he says, "that the 

* Century Magazine, vol. IV. (1883) pp. 153, 636. 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 161 

slaves shall immediately . . . be free 
from the benevolent restraints of guard- 
ianship." — [I. 294.] In short, when he 
says " immediate abolition " he means what 
is ordinarily understood by "gradual abo- 
lition," which if any man dare to express 
approval of, he will belabor him with foul 
words in his Liberator and do what he 
can to injure him in public estimation. 

With more patience than this patent 
fallacy deserved, the sober anti-slavery 
men of this country labored to clear excited 
minds of the illusion which Garrison and 
his followers persistently labored to main- 
tain. Said Leonard Bacon: 

"As for the thing which alone they profess 
to recognize as slavery, we hold it to be invari- 
ably sinful. As for the thing which, when they 
attempt to speak accurately, they call emanci- 
pation, we hold it to be the plainest and first 
duty of every master. As for the thing which 
they describe as the meaning of immediate 
abolition, we hold it to be not only practicable 
and safe, but the very first thing to be done for 
the safety of a slaveholding country. The im- 
mediate abolition against which we protest as 
perilous to the commonwealth and unjust to 
the slaves, is a different thing from that which 
the immediate abolitionists think they are urg- 
ing on the country. . . . 

"The sophism by which they unwittingly 
impose on their own minds and inflame the 



168 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

minds of others, is this : the terms ' slavery, 
' slaveholding,' • immediate emancipation,' etc. 
have one meaning in their definitions, and, to a 
great and unavoidable extent, another meaning 
in their denunciations and popular harangues. 
Thus they define a slaveholder to be one who 
claims and treats his fellow-men as property — 
as things — as destitute of all personal rights ; 
one, in a word, whose criminality is self-evi- 
dent. But the moment they begin to speak of 
slaveholders in the way of declamation, the 
word which they have strained out of its proper 
import springs back to its position, and denotes 
any man who stands in the relation of over- 
seer and governor to those whom the law has 
constituted slaves ; and consequently every 
man who, in the meaning of the laws, or in 
the meaning of common parlance, is a slave- 
holder, is denounced with unmeasured expres- 
sions of abhorrence and hate, as an enemy of 
the species. What is the effect of this on their 
own minds? What, on the minds of those 
who happen, from one cause or another, to be 
ripe for factious or fanatical excitement against 
the South? What, on the minds of those who, 
without unravelling the sophistry of the case, 
know that many a slaveholder is conscientious, 
and does regard his slaves as brethren? What, 
on the minds of those slaveholders themselves 
who are conscious of no such criminality " — 
Quarterly Christian Spectator, 1834. 

The possible effect of his sophistical talk 
on other men's minds seems not to have 
been veiled from Mr. Garrison. In the 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 169 

retrospect, at least, he looked back with 
complacency to the syllogism which he 
had furnished to the extreme defenders of 
slavery : " If human beings could be justly 
held in bondage for one hour, they could 
be for days and weeks and years, and so 
on indefinitely from generation to genera- 
tion." — [I. 140.] It was an instruction 
which needed no bettering, to fit it exactly 
to the use of pro-slavery men, North or 
South, in their conflict with the anti-sla- 
very feeling that was everywhere dominant 
when Garrison began his glorious work. 
But this bearing of it seemed to be no ob- 
jection to it in Mr. Garrison's mind; and 
the fact that it would be exasperating and 
alienating to good, conscientious and anti- 
slavery men among the slaveholders was 
vastly in its favor. His grievance with the 
old anti-slavery societies was that they did 
not "personally arraign the slaveholder 
and hold him criminal for not immediately 
emancipating his slaves, and seek to make 
him odious and put him beyond the pale 
of intercourse." — [I. 159, note. The lan- 
guage is the biographers'.] 

Nothing in all this book is more truly 
characteristic of Mr. Garrison than these 
words of his children. A policy of reform 
might be wise, effective, successful ; it 



170 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

might have extinguished slavery, as indeed 
it had extinguished it, in State after State, 
and be moving hopefully for the like result 
in other States yet; but unless it was per- 
sonally exasperating it had no charms for 
him. He was not exasperated himself; and 
he no more believed every slaveholder to 
be criminal than Dr. Bacon or Dr. Breck- 
enridge did; but with his little contrivance 
of " an elastic definition " he continued, 
with great composure and equanimity, to 
pour out the weekly torrent of bitter, foul, 
insulting language with which he succeeded 
in quenching the anti-slavery sentiment of 
the South to its last embers, and infuriat- 
ing an opposition to the very name of abo- 
litionist, even in the North, that showed 
itself in the shameful mobs which he de- 
lighted to provoke, and which were re- 
pressed or prevented by the efforts of men 
for whom he had no thanks, but only abuse 
and calumny. His love of a mob was not 
in the least like the Tipperary Irishman's 
delight in a shillalah-fight. It was a mat- 
ter of policy, and in the roughest tumble 
of it his "mind was tranquil "; and when 
it was over he sat down and footed up the 
net advantages : "New subscribers to the 
Liberator continue to come in — not less 
than a dozen to-day. Am much obliged to 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 171 

the mob."— [II. 50.] He was even capable of 
refraining from exciting a mob when he saw 
no profit in it — " a mob without doing us any 
benefit, as the market is now getting to be 
somewhat glutted with deeds of violence." 
— [II. 105.] But in general, he actually hun- 
gered for a row, and labored, when he saw 
the populace nearing the boiling-point, to 
throw in fresh provocations, and invite 
general attention to his non-resistance prin- 
ciples. On the eve of the Boston riot, he 
was disgusted with the apparent lull of 
popular excitement which threatened that 
the storm would blow over. "Boston is 
beginning to sink into apathy. The reac- 
tion has come rapidly, but we are trying 
to get the steam up again." — [II. 2.] In 
like manner, at the dedication of Pennsyl- 
vania Hall in Philadelphia, his disgust at 
the address of David Paul Brown, the emi- 
nent anti-slavery lawyer, was irrepressible. 
That address seemed adapted "to allay, in 
some measure, the prejudice that prevails 
against us and our holy cause"; and that 
was not at all what he had come to Phila- 
delphia for. There were placards out incit- 
ing to a riot, and it was an opportunity not 
to be missed. The mob needed punching 
up, and Garrison was just the man to do it. 
So he took the platform with some sneer- 



172 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 



ing and insulting remarks about Mr. Brown 
and his address, and about men of " cau- 
tion," and " prudence," and "judicious- 
ness," generally. 

"Sir. I have learned to hate those words, . . . 
Sir, slavery will not be overthrown without 
excitement, a most tremendous excitement. 
And let me say there is too much quietude in 
this city. It shows that the upholders of this 
wicked system have not yet felt that their 
favorite sin has been much endangered. You 
need and must have a moral earthquake. . . . 
Your cause will not prosper here— the philosophy 
of reform forbids you to expect it— until it ex- 
cites popular turn alt, and brings down upon it 
a shower of brickbats and rotten eggs, and it is 
threatened with a coat of tar-and-feathers."— 
[II. 215, 216, note.] 

The desire of Garrison's heart was 
promptly gratified by the smashing of the 
windows and the burning of the building ; 
out of all which he got safely off, and 
wrote to his mother-in-law in high spirits, 
from Boston. " We have had great doings 
in Philadelphia, during the present week. 
... It will do incalculable good to our 
cause. . . . Our friends are all in excellent 
spirits, shouting Alleluia! for the Lord 
God omnipotent reigneth ! Let the earth 
rejoice!" 

The attitude of Mr. Garrison and his 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 173 

queer little "persecuted remnant " of fol- 
lowers, towards the mob, was like that of 
Messrs. Dodson and Fogg towards the 
enraged Mr. Pickwick. "'Perhaps you 
would like to call us swindlers, sir,' said 
Dodson. 'Pray do, sir, if you feel dis- 
posed; now pray do, sir.' ' Go on, sir; do 
go on,' added Mr. Fogg. 'You had better 
call us thieves, sir; or perhaps you would 
like to assault one of us. Pray do it, if 
you would; we will not make the smallest 
resistance. Pray do it, sir'; and Fogg put 
himself very temptingly within the reach 
of Mr. Pickwick's clenched fist." 

The case is not exactly in point. The mob 
was by no means as innocent as Mr. Pick- 
wick, and the abusive epithets, to which 
thief and swindler were terms of compli- 
ment,were rather bestowed by Mr. Garrison 
than solicited. But Dodson and Fogg never 
equalled Mr. Garrison in the cool studious- 
ness with which he invited assault with 
the standing promise of impunity, serenely 
calculating on the ulterior advantage of it. 
He swaggered insolently about in the pan- 
oply of his non-resistance principles, the 
" Moral Bully " described by Dr. Holmes : 

" His velvet throat against thy corded wrist, 
His loosened tongue against thy doubled 
fist." 



174 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

" The Moral Bully, though he never swears, 
Nor kicks intruders down his entry stairs, 
Though meekness plants his backward-sloping 

hat, 
And non-resistance ties his white cravat, . . . 
Hugs the same passion to his narrow breast ; 
That heaves the cuirass on the trooper's 

chest ; 
Feels the same comfort, while his acrid words 
Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds, 
As the scarred ruffian of the pirate's deck 
When his long swivel rakes the staggering 

wreck." 

The lesson of Mr. Garrison's life, truly- 
told, is instructive but sad. It is the story 
of the failure and wreck of what could hard- 
ly, in any case, have been a great career, but 
might have been a wholly honorable and 
useful one. The whole course of his active 
life is a continuous history of opportunities 
wasted, influence forfeited, faithful friends 
and benefactors alienated and forced into 
hostility, and friends that still remained 
" sickened " at the folly and violence of his 
language, and at the irreparable mischiefs 
wrought by it to the cause which he claimed 
for his own. Meanwhile he was embittered 
by seeing "enlargement and deliverance 
arise from another place." The sober, con- 
scientious, Christian anti-slavery sentiment 
of the country was clearly enlightened, and 
resolutely and wisely led, by such men 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 175 

as Albert Barnes, Leonard Bacon, William 
Ellery Channing and Francis Wayland — 
men for whose persons, whose arguments, 
and whose measures Mr. Garrison had no 
words but bitter denunciation and insult, 
and all the more as he saw them leading 
on to success where he had miserably 
failed. The attempt to represent that the 
only consistent and sincere anti-slavery of 
the nation was confined to Garrison and 
the infinitesimal faction of his adherents 
— an attempt pertinaciously prosecuted by 
him during his lifetime, and now renewed 
since his death — needs to be rebuked in 
the name of public morality; and not less, 
the mischievous lesson that is deduced 
from this false representation, to wit, that 
extravagant statement, sweeping denunci- 
ation and personal abuse of antagonists 
may be relied on to carry almost any 
crotchet of "reform," if only they are 
stuck to long enough. 

The public career of Mr. Garrison, to 
which we have mainly confined our atten- 
tion, is not difficult to understand. His 
personal character as exhibited in this book 
would be a more complicated study, very 
interesting, but less important to the world. 
Certain fine qualities he had in a high de- 
gree. His courage lacked nothing, but a 



176 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

little modesty, of being perfect and entire; 
but he advertised it too much in his news- 
paper. He was completely superior to 
mercenary considerations, and took joy- 
fully the spoiling of his own goods, and 
still more joyfully the spoiling of other peo- 
ple's goods ; no one of the proprietors of 
Pennsylvania Hall seems to havee quailed 
him in the happy serenity and even hi- 
larity with which he witnessed the destruc- 
tion of that valuable property. For the 
great cause which he had at heart, he was 
willing to bear the loss of friends— so will- 
ing, in fact, that as they turned, grieved or 
indignant, from his door, he usually kicked 
them down the steps, only not with an actual 
boot of leather — that he held to be sinful. 
His sympathy with the slaves was deep 
and sincere; the groans of their prolonged 
bondage were torture to his soul; yet even 
this torture he was willing to bear cheer- 
fully for an indefinite period (no matter 
what their preference might be) rather 
than have them emancipated on incorrect 
principles [I. 348, 352] ; so far was he from 
being a reckless enthusiast in his humanity. 
Conscious of superiority to such vulgar 
forms of selfishness, he sincerely thought 
himself (there is much evidence of this, 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 177 

sometimes pathetic, sometimes amusing) 
to be a perfect man. 

One is surprised and almost sorry to find 
it claimed for him that he was not passionate 
or vindictive — that when he was running 
amuck through society, striking and stab- 
bing indiscriminately all but those that ran 
with him, it was a mere matter of policy, 
about which he chatted " gladsomely " with 
his friends. In like manner, we are pained 
to discover that he was far from being the 
pachyderm which his recklessness of the 
feelings and reputations of others indicates 
him to be. He is sensitive to the pains 
which he delights to inflict or see inflicted 
on other men. If he fairly chuckles with 
joy at preventing the Colonizationists from 
getting a place for their meeting [I. 450] 
it is not because he does not go bemoaning 
the wickedness of the churches in not being 
willing to lend him or his friends a meeting- 
house gratis. His devoted labors to make 
other people "odious, and put them beyond 
the pale of intercourse," were compatible 
with bitter complaints that he found he had 
made himself odious instead. The most 
abusive of writers is continually grumbling 
at being abused. He calls on John Breck- 
enridge, who loses his temper and becomes 
" really abusive " ; Garrison bears it with a 



178 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

grieved and injured spirit, but with angelic 
meekness, goes home and down on his 
knees for his enemy; and then puts the 
knife into him in the next Liberator as 
"ferocious and diabolical." — [I. 449.] 

Mr. Garrison's religious faith, through 
the earlier period of his life, seems genuine, 
deep and practical. Not Archbishop Laud, 
nor Saint Peter Arbuez, gives evidence of 
a more honest piety, or more strikingly il- 
lustrates Isaac Taylor's definition of fanat- 
icism, as the combination of the religious 
sentiment with the malignant passions. 

For the materials of this exposition of 
the character and career of Mr. Garrison, 
it has not been necessary to go outside of 
the voluminous biography written of him 
by his own sons. Xo one can blame them 
for not having told the whole story. They 
have told enough to make their huge book 
refute itself. Can it be wondered at that 
they should have walked backward laying 
a garment upon both their shoulders, so as 
not to see their father's shame ? But 
sooner or later some severely just and faith- 
ful hand must take up the task of thorough- 
ly exposing the perversions of history that 
have been perpetrated by a considerable 
number of writers, for the canonization of 
Garrison. It is in the interest of good 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 179 

morals that he should be known to the next 
generation, as he was known to the past 
generation, as the systematic, cold-blooded 
and unscrupulous calumniator of better 
men than himself, and the constant antag- 
onist of the men and the measures that 
were most helpful (as the event demon- 
strated) to the abolition of slavery. That 
his example may not be of evil influence 
in the future, it is needful that the demon- 
strable fact should be publicly exhibited 
and proved, that good did not come from 
the evil which he did that good might come; 
that the cause which he claimed as his own 
was begun without him, and went forward 
to success not because of him but in spite 
of him; and that the failure of his career — 
a miserable failure, notwithstanding all 
the false glorying of his panegyrists — is 
a warning to any who may hereafter be 
tempted of the devil to follow him in those 
methods which won for him the indelible 
title of "malignant philanthropist." This 
work might well occupy a volume, or more 
than one. But something may be accom- 
plished towards it, even within the narrow 
limits of a magazine article. 



180 WILLIAM LLOYD GAREISON. 



II. 



The common account of Mr. Garrison's 
career is to this effect : That he found the 
country, and especially the Christian Church 
and ministry, sunken in a deep and criminal 
apathy concerning the condition of the 
negro population of America, both slave and 
free; that by his earnest and powerful ap- 
peals he succeeded in arousing the public 
conscience to the sinfulness of slavery, and 
enlisting its sympathies with his cause; that 
the principles which he enunciated, the 
measures which he advocated, and the men 
whom he drew around him and organized 
for action, became effective at last of the 
abolition of slavery. 

The demonstrable facts of history are 
these : At the time of the strangely tardy 
awakening of Mr. Garrison's conscience to 
the wrongfulness of slavery, there was a 
generally prevalent and growing anti-slavery 
sentiment both at the North and at the 
South, and this sentiment was especially 
active in the Christian Church and ministry; 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 181 

it continued active on the same principles 
and along similar lines of effort with those 
under which freedom had already been se- 
cured to one-half of the Union, and was 
operating hopefully in several of the border 
slave States; it was effecting emancipations 
from year to year by the hundred and the 
thousand; it was zealous in promoting the 
welfare of the free blacks. The new princi- 
ples, measures and methods inaugurated by 
Mr. Garrison had no effect on the general 
anti-slavery sentiment of the country except 
to defeat its enterprises at the North, and to 
extinguish it at the South; they procured 
the abolition or mitigation of slavery in no 
single State, and, so far as known, the 
emancipation of no single slave; the peace- 
ful, constitutional and legal measures for re- 
sisting the spread of slavery that were under- 
taken in the interest of freedom were in 
succession steadfastly resisted by Mr. Garri- 
son and his men; the notable and successful 
leaders in the anti- slavery conflict were by 
him, with few exceptions, discredited and 
vilified; when, in spite of him, the advance 
of slavery had been barred by the colonizing 
of Kansas, no resource was left to the friends 
of slavery but secession and war; when seces- 
sion came, Mr. Garrison took sides with the 
secessionists; when war was begun, he was 



182 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

in favor of surrender. If Mr. Garrison 
could have won the anti-slavery people of 
the North into sympathy with his notions, 
slavery would have been dominant to-day 
throughout the entire country. Unhappily, 
in alienating the people of the country from 
himself and from his odious peculiarities, he 
alienated them also from the cause which he 
misrepresented; and succeeded in nothing so 
much as in making the very name of aboli- 
tionist to be the object of general detesta- 
tion. 

The despondency of anti-slavery men that 
followed their defeat in the struggle over 
the Missouri Compromise was not of long 
continuance. Already in 1820 the pen of 
Jeremiah Evarts, always ready and potent 
in a good cause, was busy in The Panoplist, 
showing that there was no reason for despair 
— that the condition of the negro population 
of America was still a legitimate subject 
of discussion, and the improvement of 
their condition still a legitimate object of 
effort on the part of patriotic and Christian 
men. The anti-slavery sermon of the 
younger Edwards, republished by Mr. Gur- 
ley, of the Colonization Society, was circu- 
lated both at the North and at the South. 
In the anti-slavery revival of this period, 
naturally enough, Andover Seminary largely 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 18*3 

shared. Of the six essays contained in the 
manuscript Transactions of its " Society of 
Inquiry Concerning Missions " of this time, 
not less than four relate to slavery and the 
colored people. The first of these, by K. 
Washburn, on the question, What is the 
duty of the Government, and the duty of 
Christians, with regard to slavery in the 
United States ? begins thus: 

" Perhaps there is not a more marked fea- 
ture in the history of modern benevolent op- 
erations than the efforts made in favor of the 
unfortunate Africans. Forty years ago, 
there were few to weep over the wrongs and 
wretchedness of slavery; now thousands call 
the sons of Africa brethren, thousands are 
willing to devote their money and their ef- 
forts to redeem them from their long captivi- 
ty, and thousands offer the daily prayer to 
Him who ' hath made of one blood all na- 
tions to dwell on the face of the earth/ that 
He would shorten the days of darkness and 
crime, and hasten that day of light and 
glory when oppressions shall cease, and a 
universal jubilee be proclaimed for all the 
enslaved of the human family." 

The long report to that society, from the 
pen of Leonard Bacon, " On the Black Pop- 
ulation of the United States," containing 
denunciations of American slavery as sol- 
emnly severe as could be expressed in lan- 
guage, was extensively circulated in New 



184 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

England by the Andover students, and its 
severest anti-slavery passages were repub- 
lished in Eichmond. Every Fourth of July 
the most effective speakers among the And- 
over students went out into the neighboring 
towns to advocate the cause of the negro 
whether in slavery or in nominal freedom. 
The annual religious celebration of the 
Fourth by some associated churches of Bos- 
ton, from the year 1823 onward, opened the 
famous pulpit of Park Street to the same 
subject, and there Louis Dwight, Leonard 
Bacon, John Todd and others in successive 
years spoke in no uncertain tones. 

Naturally enough, the young men who 
went forth from this centre of -anti slavery 
agitation did not lose their love of freedom 
in entering on the pastoral work. We fol- 
low the course of one of them, not as ex- 
ceptional but as representative of the young 
clergy of the time ; and we choose our 
example for two reasons, first, for our spe- 
cial opportunities of knowing his course, 
and secondly, because his name has been, 
and is to this day, systematically vilified as 
an example of the "universal apathy on 
the subject of slavery" prevailing in the 
community and especially in the Church, in 
the days before Garrison. 

When Leonard Bacon, at the age of 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 185 

twenty-three, took charge of the ancient 
church at New Haven, in 1825, one of the 
earliest incidents of his work was the or- 
ganization of a club of young men, some of 
whose names were destined to become fa- 
mous in the great conflict, under the name 
of "The Anti-Slavery Association." Out of 
the labors and studies of this club grew 
"The African Improvement Society of 
New Haven," in which he and his associ- 
ates toiled with eminent success for the up- 
lifting of the colored people of that city 
from their deplorable degradation. 

In March, 1826, his friend Mr. Gurley, 
of the Colonization Society, wrote to him 
indignantly from Washington, of a speech 
of Mr. Everett's which he had just heard, 
apologizing for slavery. Said Mr. Gurley, 
"If he dares to publish these sentiments, 
which go to sustain a most iniquitous sys- 
tem, our friends at the North must not be 
silent." They were not silent. Mr. Ba- 
con's Fourth of July sermon of that year, 
from the text, "Cry aloud; spare not ; lift 
up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my 
people their transgressions," declared it to 
be "the duty of every citizen of the United 
States to promote by every means in his 
power the abolition of slavery"; and con- 
tinued : 



18G WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

"Public opinion throughout the free 
States must hold a different course on 
the subject of slavery from that which it 
now holds. Instead of exhausting itself 
fruitlessly and worse than fruitlessly upon 
the operation of the system, it must be di- 
rected towards the principle on which the 
system rests. It must become such that on 
the one hand the man who indulges his 
malignity or ids thoughtlessness in so ex- 
aggerating the evils attendant on the opera- 
tion of the system as to implicate the body 
of the slaveholders in the charge of cruelty 
and tyranny shall feel himself rebuked and 
shamed by the nobler spirit that pervades 
his fellow -citizens ; and such that on the 
other hand the man who dares to stand up 
in Congress and, presuming on the for- 
bearance of those who sent him, attempts to 
purchase popularity by defending the prin- 
ciple of slavery, shall find himself greeted 
on his return to his constituents with one 
loud burst of indignation and reproof." 

There was nothing startling in these 
views of the young preacher; they were the 
common opinions of the American Church 
at that time. He himself testified forty 
years later : " From the beginning of my 
official ministry, I spoke without reserve, 
from the pulpit and elsewhere, against 
slavery as a wrong and a curse, threatening 
disaster and ruin to the nation. Many years 
I did this without being blamed, except as I 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 187 

was blamed for not going far enough. Not 
a dog dared to wag his tongue at me for 
speaking against slavery." 

It is an instructive fact already adverted 
to, that when the speech that so stirred the 
indignation of these two colonizationists 
reached Mr. Garrison in his editorial office, 
he found nothing in it to object to ; he 
thought it a good speech, and printed it 
according^. He was at the time much con- 
cerned about the oppression of the Greeks. 
There does seem to have been " apathy " 
sometvhere, in those days. 

A favorite plan of the young men at An- 
dover was the scheme of a college for the 
liberal education of colored youth. The 
scheme seems to have been first publicly an- 
nounced by Mr. Bacon when, at the age of 
barely twenty-one, he urged it on the support 
of the Colonization Society at Washington in 
1823. It was set forth more publicly yet in 
his "Plea for Africa" from Park Street 
pulpit in 1824, and at New Haven in 1825. 
It was much in his thoughts and in his 
letters. It met with a painful discourage- 
ment in the early death of Samuel Hooker 
Oowles, one of that circle of young Andover 
abolitionists, who was "willing to lend his 
hand to any measure which prudence and 
philanthropy might dictate/ ' but whose 



188 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

cherished plan, as expressed in a biographi- 
cal sketch in The Christian Spectator (1828, 
p. 4), was ' ' the establishment of an African 
college, where youth were to be educated 
on a scale so liberal as to place them on a 
level with other men, and fit them for ex- 
tensive usefulness to their brethren, either 
in this country or in the colonies." Not 
only in Andover was the plan taken up with 
eagerness. President Griffin, of Williams 
College, was its enthusiastic friend. Theo- 
dore Woolsey was earnest and wise in coun- 
sel about it ; and his friend Ridgely wrote 
to Woolsey and Bacon: 

"1 am delighted with the idea of calling a 
general meeting at New York to deliberate 
about the practicability of establishing a Ne- 
gro University, The necessities of Africa cry 
aloud for some such institution. Her chil- 
dren are starving for the bread of knowledge. 
They must have it. It is my opinion that 
twenty well educated and accomplished 
young negro gentlemen (I hope you are pre- 
pared for the unusual association of terms) 
would do more for that forlorn and outcast 
race than all that has been yet accomplished 
by their distinguished benefactors at Wash- 
ington. It would go far to dignify the 
name." 

Already, in the summer of 1825, the proj- 
ect had been talked over in the little Anti- 
Slavery Association at New Haven. It is 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 189 

needless to detail here the encouragements 
and the delays that it met with. At last, 
however, in the summer of 1829, the well- 
matured plan of the institution was submit- 
ted to a circle of leading citizens of New 
Haven, especially those connected with Yale 
College, and was cordially approved. A 
large conditional subscription towards it was 
made by a member of Mr. Bacon's congrega- 
tion, and the scheme which for more than 
six years had been actively promoted by the 
friends of the negro race seemed in a fair 
way to be realized. 

We have spoken at such length of the 
work done at New Haven as being an ex- 
ample of the humane and kindly work that 
was going on with increasing zeal and suc- 
cess throughout the North. There was not 
to be found in all the Free States a consider- 
able city without its Clarkson Society or its 
African Improvement Society intent on simi- 
lar labors. And the men and women who 
gladly gave their time, money and influence 
to promote this work were everywhere the 
earnest friends of that enterprise of African 
colonization, one great argument for which 
was its tendency to elevate the free colored 
people in America, and another great argu- 
ment, its tendency to promote emancipation 
and the abolition of slavery.* 

* Christian Spectator, II. 470-482, 534; IV. 318-334; V. 
163-168. 



190 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

At this juncture, in that series of Fourth 
of July discourses in which Mr. Bacon five 
years before had delivered his " Plea for 
Africa/' Mr. Garrison makes his tardy en- 
trance as an anti-slavery orator. The most 
notable characteristic of his discourse is the 
extravagance of his zeal for colonization. It 
was the one door of hope for the African 
race. It was to accomplish instantaneous 
wonders. But except for this and for his 
wild suggestion that the colored population 
of the country should be deported at the ex- 
pense of the federal government, it does not 
appear that his speech differed materially 
from the half-dozen anti-slavery discourses 
that had preceded his in the same series. 
His impression that he was alone and pecul- 
iar in his sympathy for the blacks, "over 
whose sufferings scarcely an eye weeps, or a 
heart melts, or a tongue pleads either to God 
or man," was simply one of his constitution- 
al eccentricities. 

Coming forth in the summer of 1830 from 
his brief imprisonment in Baltimore jail, he 
made a progress through the northern cities 
in his character of martyr to the rights of 
the negro, making addresses to such meet- 
ings of the colored people as he was able to 
gather. Poor, ignorant, facile creatures, 
they were the ready victims of any dema- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 191 

gogue who should cajole them with flatter- 
ies, or intoxicate them with silly expecta- 
tions, or irritate their vindictive passions. 
These things Mr. Garrison was not ashamed 
to do, poisoning the minds of the colored 
people against the benefactors who had done 
so much for them, and were on the point of 
doing so much more, by representing that 
these were in a dark plot to keep them in 
ignorance and degradation.* The mischief 
that he wrought in thus defeating the fair- 
est hopes then open before that injured peo- 
ple is not to be computed. The story of 
how, in unconscious coalition with the baser 
passions of the populace, he brought the 
noble enterprise of the African College to 
wreck is too long to tell at this time. He 
succeeded in identifying it, in the public 
mind, with his own pernicious teachings, and 
it was swept away by the shameful panic 

* Address to the Free People of Color, by W. L. Garrison. 
Review of the same, Christian Spec tator, IV., 311. The 
results of careful inquiry into the needs of these peo- 
ple, set before the charitable public to incite to sympathy 
and effort for their relief, were quoted to the blacks to 
show them that " those who have entered into this con- 
spiracy against human bights [the colonization enter- 
prise] are unanimous in abusing their victims.' 1 — Libera- 
tor, I. 65. Also, II. 99. 

Mr. Garrison's ferocious crusade against colonization 
was only an episode in his career, and need not be here 
detailed. The swarming fallacies and falsehoods in his 
"Thoughts on Colonization " (perhaps the most dishonest 
piece of polemic ever written) were exposed in the Chris- 
tian Spectator, V. 145 ; but this did not hinder their be- 
in? repeated over and over for the good of the cause, as 
they are still repeated for the falsification of history. See 
O. Johnson's " Garrison and His Times," 104, 109. 



192 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

resolutions of a ~New Haven city meeting, 
but not without repeated solemn and in- 
dignant protests from Mr. Bacon, who lost 
in that ruin the hopes and patient labors of 
seven years.* 

We must pass, rapidly, point by point, 
over the chief points on which Mr. Garri- 
son fought against the anti-slavery cause, 
taking sides with its enemies. 

As we have already seen, the stronghold 
of anti-slavery sentiment was in the Churches. 
In the progress of that pro-slavery reaction 
which began with Mr. Garrison's movement 
and moved parallel with it, growing with its 
growth and strengthening with its strength, 
those men did the noblest service to the 
cause of freedom who labored to hold the 
Churches to their principles. But they got 
no help from Mr. Garrison — only sneers and 
discouragements. His effort was just the 
opposite — to get all the anti-slavery men out 
of the Church, and turn the whole influence 
of that institution over to the enemy. For 
this purpose, he, and his confederates with 
his smiling encouragement, assailed it with 

♦See The Religious Intelligencer (New Haven), September 
and October, 1831. The editorial comments on this sub- 
ject were well known to be from Mr. Bacon's pen. The 
story of this affair as told by Mr. Garrison's disciples 
makes the plan of an African College to have been an en- 
terprise of "the Abolitionists" first broached two years 
before by good Mr. Joeelyn, and defeated with the guilty 
connivance and cowardice of Mr. Bacon. See " Garrison 
and His Times," 119-124. " Life of Garrison," I. 259. 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARFISON. 193 

unprintable vilifications, delighted if there- 
by they could draw a disorderly crowd, to 
their meeting. As this went on, the best 
men among his adherents left him in dis- 
gust, and among those who remained were 
some who saw how suicidal was this course, 
and sought to arrest it, but were answered 
with defiance.* Was it strange that this 

* At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti- 
Slavery Society in 1842, Mr. Pierce, of Lexington, moved 
the following resolutions : 

Resolved, As the sense of this meeting, that it is not by 
the use of opprobrious epithets and harsh and sweeping 
denunciations, but by speaking the truth in love, that 
abolitionists will best promote the cause of justice and 
truth. 

Resolved, As the sense of this meeting, that in their 
writings, public discussions and private conversations, 
abolitionists should refrain from the indiscriminate cen- 
sure and denunciation of whole classes and associations of 
persons, as the clergy and churches of various denomina- 
tions, and all those who refuse tounite with them regarding 
such censure and denunciation, as unjust and highly im- 
politic. 

Resolved, As the sense of this meeting, that the propos- 
ing, advocating or sustaining such resolutions as the fol- 
lowing (which were discussed at a recent anti-slavery 
meeting), "that the religion of the United States of 
America is one vast system of atheism and idolatry, which 
in atrocity and vileness equals that of any system in the 
heathen countries of Asia or Africa or the islands of the 
Pacific Ocean "; " that the sectarian churches and min- 
istry of this country are combinations of thieves, adulter- 
ers and pirates, and not the churches and ministers of 
Jesus Christ, and should be treated as brothels and ban- 
ditti by all who would exculpate themselves from the 
guilt of slaveholding ; " "that any man who goes to the 
polls and votes for a slave-owner or any other than an 
outspoken abolitionist, acts on the same principle with the 
Algerian buccaneer, and ought not to be recognized as an 
abolitionist' 1 — manifests a spirit which, if at all consistent 
with the spirit of the Gospel, is not likely to gain friends to 
the anti-slavery enterprise, but bring upon it needless 
odium. 

The quotations are a characteristic specimen of what 
used to pass for ' * eloquence " on Mr. Garrison's platforms. 

Naturally, Mr. Pierce's resolutions were promptly laid 
upon the table; but when, two years after, Mr. Garrison 
moved that "the American Church was a synagogue of 
Satan," there was, of course, no hesitation about "resolv- 
ing' 1 it. 



194 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

mad policy should have been so far success- 
ful as to inspire many good people in the 
Churches with a violent antipathy to the 
very name of anti-slavery or abolition ? 

One of the first conflicts in the struggle 
against the insolent aggressions of the slave 
power was to secure the recognition in Con- 
gress of the rights to which freedom was 
entitled under the Constitution and existing 
laws. The battle for the right of petition 
was fought out in the House of Representa- 
tives with splendid ability and heroic cour- 
age and endurance by John Quincy Adams. 
That good fight of his, single-handed against 
the crowd, is the finest chapter in our par- 
liamentary history. The noble and venera- 
ble " old man eloquent," at the outset of the 
fight, was brutally stigmatized in the Liber- 
ator as "a dough-face." 

The conflict was renewed again in the per- 
ilous days of 1851. That was a great day for 
liberty when Charles Sumner, elected to the 
Senate without the support of the Abolition- 
ists and in spite of their efforts to defeat 
him, pronounced his masterly argument, 
"Freedom Rational: Slavery Sectional." 
This noble speech, which did so much towards 
bringing the nation back to its old bearings, 
and which struck the keynote of the march 
of the Republican party to its final success 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 195 

under the lead of Lincoln, was denounced 
by Mr. Garrison in a resolution as "false 
and absurd, and an outrage on common 
sense/'* The little band of faithful men at 
the Capitol, the forlorn-hope of Freedom in 
her darkest hour — Seward, Sumner, Hale, 
Giddings, and the rest — were insulted, derid- 
ed, discredited in the name of anti-slavery. 

It was not in vain that these losing fights 
were fought out in the Houses of Congress. 
But the debate had to be held in a wider 
forum, and decided by the people. At the 
first Mr. Garrison had been impatient to 
persuade or drive men to the polls in an 
anti-slavery party. When, at last, the first 
beginnings of such action were taken (per- 
haps prematurely — there was a divided judg- 
ment among earnest men about that), they 
encountered Garrison's bitter mockery and 
denunciation. It was Resolved that a third 
political party is "fraught with unmitigated 
evil and mischief to the abolition enterprise. " 
Those who sympathized with the effort — 

* As usual in his extravagances, Mr. Garrison had begun 
by being- preposterously extravagant on the other side of 
the question. In his Address to the Free People f Color, 
1831, he had gravely advised his unfortunate clients that 
all the disabilities which they were suffering from un- 
friendly State laws could be swept away at one stroke by 
simply carrying a case up to the Supreme Court.from which 
august tribunal they might " walk abroad in majesty and 
strength, free as the air of heaven, sacred as the persons 
of kings." 



196 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

such men as Birney, Hale, Leayitt, Whittier, 
Lewis Tappan — were made the targets of 
his contumely. No": only their persons, but 
in every important issue their cause, found 
in him an ill-wisher and an enemy. When 
freedom and slavery were in the grapple over 
the annexation of Texas, for all his stormy 
speeches about the wickedness of that meas- 
ure, he lent no hand to prevent it, but hoped 
that "the slave power might become more 
and more severe, " so as to bring to pass the 
horrors of that disunion which he was always 
coveting. He would dissuade anti-slavery 
voters from their duty as citizens, and deliv- 
er the question over to be decided by the 
enemies of freedom. 

The war with Mexico was finished, and the 
question rose before the nation, what should 
be the destiny of the territories acquired 
from the neighbor republic. Freedom was 
never, in all the history of this conflict, so 
near a great, peaceful, and decisive victory 
as when the Wilmot Proviso, consecrating 
all that domain to free labor, was at issue. 
While good citizens were bending their en- 
ergies to the struggle, the bird of ill omen 
kept croaking his discouragements. There 
was no hope; the nation must go on to dis- 
grace and ruin; slavery must of necessity be 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 197 

triumphant; it is too late for reform; there 
is no remedy but revolution.* 

The party of Free Soil kept growing in 
importance; but Mr. Phillips moved, and 
the Anti-Slavery Society voted (1843),. that 
it was " a misdirection and waste of effort, 
and attempt at impossibilities. " Like both 
the old parties, it was "essentially pro- 
slavery." The party adopted the bold and 
wise measure of planting an anti-slavery jour- 
nal, The National Era, at the City of Wash- 
ington, under Dr. Bailey, Amos A. Phelps, 
and John G. Whittier as editors. But slave- 
holders were assured that " if they knew the 
party and the editors, they would be relieved 
of all alarm. ' ' The sneers at Whittier might 
be justified on the ground of his having left 
the noisy camp of Mr. Garrison, and of the 
necessity of maintaining discipline by shoot- 
ing deserters; but it could have been only 
the love of vituperation for its own sake that 
led to the denouncing of Longfellow for hav- 
ing in his noble lyric " The Building of the 
Ship," "prostituted his fine genius to eulo- 
gize the blood-stained American Union, "f 

The turning-point in the long fight with 

*Mass. A. S. Report, 1847, p. 10. 

f The quotations are from the Mass. A. S. Reports. Page 
after page these Reports are a continuous illustration of 
Mr. Garrison's constancy in getting upon the wrong side 
of every question affecting the cause of liberty, and abus- 
ing every one that was doing any useful work on the right 
side. 



198 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

the slave power was reached when, after the 
perfidy of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had 
been consummated, and at the moment of 
the almost despair of the friends of freedom, 
Eli Thayer, with heroic hopefulness and 
magnificent energy and ability, colonized 
Kansas with free settlers, and blocked the 
further extension of slavery. It is an al- 
most incredible fact, and yet a fact, that 
Mr. Garrison and his little residuum of 
noisy followers did discourage and do what 
they could to defeat that noble, lawful and 
peaceful enterprise which gave checkmate 
to slavery and saved the continent for free- 
dom. The story is authentically told by 
Mr. Thayer's own lively pen in "The Kan- 
sas Crusade." 

It was in the flush of this triumph that 
the election of Lincoln was achieved in 
1860. Both the platform and the candi- 
date of the Eepublican party were in direct 
antagonism with every item of Mr. Garri- 
son's distinctive principles.* And he was 
merely consistent with his principles in re- 

*Mr. Lincoln repeatedly acknowledged his indebtedness 
for his definite convictions on the subject of slavery to 
the volume of Essays on Slavery by Leonard Bacon, 
which had fallen into his hands when he was a young 
man. The little book, now rare, is directed on the one 
hand against slavery, and on the other hand against that 
type of abolitionism represented by Mr. Garrison. It is 
irom _ the preface to this book that Lincoln borrowed his 
much-quoted phrase, "If slavery is not wrong, then noth- 
ing is wrong.'" 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 199 

fusing approval to the party, and consistent 
with his usages of speech in characterizing 
Abraham Lincol nasa" slave-hound . ' ' The 
helpers and counsellors of the great Emanci- 
pator, Chase, Seward, Sumner, Wilson, 
Wade, and the rest were subjected to like 
contumely. 

Secession, long threatened, came at last, 
and found its friends and supporters, at 
the North, in Mr. Garrison and his little 
company. For many years the sagacious 
plan of Mr. Garrison had been identical 
with that of the Southern conspirators — 
though he expressed it differently — the 
founding of an independent, warlike, ag- 
gressive nation wholly devoted to slavery 
and occupying as its own the larger half of 
the domain of the Union, with as much 
more to the south and to the north as it 
might be able to seize and hold. It was 
part of his plan that the new nation should 
be started "peacefully/' with every oppor- 
tunity for strengthening itself in arms and 
alliances until it should be ready for offen- 
sive operations ; and (if he could have his 
way about it) that the residuary northern 
nation should be organized on non-resistant 
principles, defending itself from its fierce 
neighbor only by the arms of love, A 
program more charming to the friends of 



200 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

slavery it is impossible to conceive. That 
they did not accept the treasonable in- 
vitation of abolitionist conventions to a 
" free correspondence with the disunionists 
of the South, in order to devise the most 
suitable way and means to secure the con- 
summation so devoutly to be wished," * 
could only have been because they knew 
how contemptibly insignificant was the fac- 
tion from which the invitation proceeded. 
But if they had counted on what support 
the faction could give, they did not count 
in vain. "To think of whipping the 
South," said Mr. Garrison, "is utterly 
chimerical;" and he proposed to say to the 
slave States: "Depart in peace. Though 
you have laid piratical hands upon property 
not your own, we surrender it all in the 
spirit of magnanimity ; and if nothing but 
the possession of the capital will appease 
you, take even that without a struggle." f 
On practical questions he was in cordial 
agreement with Davis and Toombs and 
Yancey and their confederates. 

It is a most pleasant thing to record that 
the awful shock of war, when it came, did 
at last sober the chronic madness of the 
man. By his antecedents he was committed 

•Resolution adopted at New York, December, 1859, 
t Liberator, xxxi. 27. 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 201 

"against all wars and all preparations for 
war; against every naval ship, every arsenal, 
every fortification; . . . against all appropria- 
tions for the defence of a nation by force 
and arms." * But now, to the astonishment 
of good citizens and the dismay of his old 
associates, he boldly turned his back upon 
himself, and rendered to the imperilled gov- 
ernment and nation the best service in his 
power. There is nothing in all his career 
so honorable as his unfaithfulness, at this 
juncture, to his foolish so-called principles. 
According to these principles, the business 
of soldier was simple, unmitigated murder; 
but when his son starts for the war as officer 
in a colored regiment, he sends him off with 
his blessing for being true to his convictions, 
though regretting that these convictions are 
morally unsound, f War and slavery, in Mr. 
Garrison's view, were under like and equal 
condemnation. If affairs at that time had 
been on the old footing, and young Mr. 
Garrison had conscientiously believed, as 
many conscientious persons in the old times 
certainly did believe, that duty called him 
to be a faithful and humane master of slaves, 
it would have been a most pleasing and edi- 
fying spectacle to see the Reformer waving 
a parting salute to the young man as he 

* " Life of Garrison," ii. 231. t" Life of Garrison,' 1 iv. 84. 



202 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

started for his plantation, saying, "I could 
have wished that you could see the matter 
as I do, but since you are faithful to your 
own convictions, God bless you, my boy." 
Unfortunately this degree of considerateness 
for the conscientious convictions of others, 
which Mr. Garrison so amiably manifested 
towards his own son, was not developed in 
his moral constitution early enough to save 
him from many painful and mischievous 
mistakes in his behavior towards other peo- 
ple's sons. 

After all, Mr. Garrison did really, at the 
eleventh hour, come into the vineyard and 
take his place among those who had spent 
the heat of the day in practically useful and 
effective labors for the cause of human free- 
dom; and who shall grudge him the remark- 
ably large pennyworth of credit that he gets 
for it ? It does, nevertheless, seem to be a 
public duty of considerable importance to 
correct some of the perversions of history 
that are attempted for his canonization. We 
have no ignoble discontent at hearing Aris- 
tides called The Just, no matter how fre- 
quently; but when it comes to a settled plan 
to keep calling Themistocles The Just, the 
case is different. 



CONCERNING THE USE OF FAGOTS 
AT GENEVA 



CONCERNING THE USE OF 
FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 



Fagot is one of that large class of com- 
mon words that grow familiar to Amer- 
icans in literature, but the meaning of 
which is not distinctly realized to the senses 
till we go abroad. To make sensible ac- 
quaintance with commonplace objects that 
one has known from childhood only by 
name is one of the delights of travel, as 
much as the seeing of famous places and 
pictures and buildings; and I believe that 
it is partly because they have so much 
more of this to do, that Americans are, be- 
yond other nations, enthusiastic and de- 
lighted travellers. Doubtless one would go 
farther to see Melrose by moonlight than 
to see a teakettle simmering on a hob; 
but after all, to the diligent reader of 
his Scott and his Dickens, there are many 
like elements of pleasure in the two sights; 
and I will not too hastily decide whether 
I have more daily pleasure from the vast 
white pyramid of Mont Blanc, that looks 



206 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

me in the face through my parlor windows,* 
and " clear, placid Leman," down the slope 
beneath me, and the gray mass of towers 
of the old cathedral to my right, than comes 
to me from the magpies that chase each 
other chattering across the lawn, and the 
primroses and tiny daisies that blossom 
along our path under favor of this mild 
February, and the tufts of legendary mis- 
tletoe that hang in the bare poplar tree, 
and the hedge-rows, from which the gar- 
dener is now busy in gathering store of 
good material for next winter's fagots. 

Which brings me back again to fagots, 
where we started. The fagot is not, as I 
used vaguely to imagine, a mere indefinite 
bundle of fire-wood. There is logic in its 
constitution, as there has sometimes been, 
in the severest sense, logic in its applica- 
tion. First, there shall be a handful or two 
of small twigs, such as the trimmings of 
the hedges furnish in generous abundance; 
then a handful of bigger brush; and finally, 
two, or at most three, stoutish sticks, to 
give solidity and respectability to the 
whole. These elements being brought to- 
gether, then does the hedger cunningly lay 
about them a green and supple withe, and 

* In revising this paper for its present use, the writer 
has not thought needful to wash out the " local color " 
that came into it by its being written at Geneva. 



THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 207 

by some dexterous twist or double-hitch 
firmly bind them into one. With a few 
months' seasoning, the true and normal 
fagot becomes the ideally perfect com- 
mencement of a wood fire. A wisp of 
lighted paper, sometimes a mere match, is 
enough to start a combustion which ma- 
tures, when properly sustained, into a solid 
mass of brands and coals. I often raise 
the question whether the enormous waste 
of small wood in all our forests, even those 
within easy reach of a market, might not 
be saved, and a fine opportunity of delight- 
ful employment given to workless city 
street-boys, if some one would only organ- 
ize a phalanx of fagoteers for an expedi- 
tion against the underbrush which is so 
often accounted a nuisance, but might so 
easily be converted into a blessing both to 
him that gives and him that takes. 

It would astonish you to see in this wood- 
less country, where coal is of easy access, 
how general is the dependence both for 
warmth and for cooking on wood fires; 
when, in New England, even farmers in 
little inland towns begin to feel that they 
cannot afford to burn wood on a hearth. 
If you were to ask me whence come the sup- 
plies on which the people here rely, I 
should refer you partly to the mountains, 



208 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

but rather to sundry lines of lopped and 
stumpy posts that intersect the landscape, 
bearing all over their wrinkled bark the 
scars of ancient wounds, and about their 
knobby heads, sometimes, chaplets of gay 
young sprouts, strangely in contrast with 
their aspect of venerable and bereaved old 
age. The Swiss woodman rarely ventures 
manfully to attack a tree at its trunk. He 
trims, he lops, he maims, he mutilates, and 
then he leaves the poor branchless, leafless 
stock to bring forth a new progeny for a 
renewed slaughter. Standing before one 
of these venerable boles, gnarled and hol- 
lowed out with age, yet making one more 
brave effort to put forth a growth of young 
branches, one is irresistibly reminded of 
some white-haired old " mammy " cherish- 
ing her last pickaninny of a grandchild, 
and telling the rueful story of two genera- 
tions gone one by one to the auction-block. 
There is vast economy in this method, I 
am told. Managed with care, the mere 
shrubbery and ornamental trees on a gentle- 
man's place can be made to yield his sup- 
ply of fire-wood and hardly show any mark 
save that of judicious pruning. But oh! 
the ruthless cruelty of it as generally con- 
ducted! Hardly a tree in the canton of 
Geneva is suffered to grow in its natural 



THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 209 

shape; and the wide waste of reckless ruin 
around a charcoal pit on a Litchfield County 
hill-side is less sad than the double aisle of 
naked trunks of beech and oak that stand 
despairing in the hedge-rows between 
which I take my daily walk to town. 

My fagot, as I find it waiting for me in 
the morning on my study hearth, sets me 
thinking on many things. I think of Ro- 
man lictors and their fasces; of " the good 
La Fontaine " and his fable teaching that 
union is strength; and as I strike a match, 
and the flame crackles through the twigs, 
and there is a smell as of a forest fire, and 
in a moment a fierce blaze shoots up the 
chimney, I think of Fox's " Book of Mar- 
tyrs," and of Latimer, and Ridley, and 
others of whom the world was not worthy. 
For the fagot has been hallowed, like the 
cross, as the implement Of death for re- 
ligion's sake. 

But most I am reminded of that October 
day, nearly three hundred and fifty years 
ago, when one of the first physicians of that 
time, and one of the greatest scholars of an 
age of great scholars, was brought out from 
the prison in which he had been shivering 
with cold and devoured by vermin, and led 
into the presence of the magistrates of 
Geneva to listen to this sentence: 



210 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

"Having God and His Holy Scriptures 
before our eyes, and speaking in the name 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the 
Holy Ghost, we do by this our final sen- 
tence, which we give herewith in writing, 
condemn thee, Michael Servetus, to be 
bound and led to the place called Champel, 
and there to be attached to a stake, and 
burned alive with thy book both in man- 
uscript and in print, until thy body be re- 
duced to ashes; and so shalt thou end thy 
days to give example to others who might 
commit the same crime." 

The records do not inform us whether 
the school-boys at Geneva had a half -holi- 
day the next morning, when the procession 
started from the prison at the top of the 
city hill for the place of execution at 
Champel. The principal figure in the pro- 
cession, Servetus, though suffering from 
disease, and haggard, no doubt, from his 
imprisonment and from mental anguish, 
was a man in the strength of his age — he 
was forty-four years old, having been born 
in the same year with John Calvin. By his 
side walked Farel, the friend of Calvin, ex- 
horting him to confess and renouncehishere- 
sies ; but he only declared that he suffered 
unjustly, and prayed God to have mercy 
on his accusers. " Whereupon," says Farel, 
ic I said to him immediately : 'What, what! 
when you have committed the worst of 



THE USE OP FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 211 

sins, you justify yourself ! If you go on 
so, I will leave you to God's judgments ; I 
won't go with you another step ! I had 
meant to stand by you till your last breath.' 
After that, he did not say anything more 
of the sort. He prayed: O God, save my 
soul ! O Jesus, Son of God eternal, have 
mercy on me!' But," says Farel, "we 
could not make him confess Christ as eter- 
nal Son of God." 

They came, at last, to the place called 
Champel. Few visitors at Geneva see the 
spot. The people are not proud to show it. 
It is on a hill-side to the south of the town, 
commanding a fair view of the broad val- 
ley of the Rhone, and of the ancient city. 
The precise place is now covered by a 
house ; but I have met old people who 
remembered when it was known as the 
Champ du Boarreaii — Hangman's Lot — 
and who say that when they were boys 
there was a little pit in the midst of it 
that they used to point out to one another 
as the place where the stake was planted. 
Here the pitiful procession halted. With 
much persuasion the victim was induced 
to commend himself to the prayers of the 
people. And when he had kneeled down 
and prayed, he stepped upon the fagots 
that were heaped about the stake, and was 



212 THE USE OP FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

bound to it by a chain about the waist ; 
his book was hung at his side ; a wreath 
of leaves dusted over with brimstone was 
placed on his head; there was one loud cry- 
as the executioner brought up the lighted 
torch ; but that was the end of it. Some 
say the fagots were green ; but then old 
Mr. Gaberel's History may be right, that 
this was out of humanity, so that the suffo- 
cating smoke might put the sufferer more 
quickly out of misery. 

"That was the end of it," we said. It 
seemed to be the end of it. But somehow 
this case of Servetus, in one shape or an- 
other, keeps coming into court over and 
over again from generation to generation. 
Generally, not to say always, it comes in 
the shape of a discussion of what sort 
of part it was that John Calvin had in 
the affair ; and in this discussion a very 
needless amount of acrimony has been 
shown by some, who have seemed to think 
that the character of Calvin's theology, 
or of that great and splendid order of 
Christian churches of which he was the 
father, was somehow involved in the 
result. Let those on either side who have 
been discomposed by such a thought bear 
in mind that the discredit of whatever 
wrong Calvin may have done in this mat- 



THE USE OP FAGOTS AT GENEVA, 213 

ter can fall only on those who accept and 
justify his course. 

To defend Calvin for his course towards 
Servetus is no longer possible, in the light 
of the full array of evidence now acces- 
sible to every scholar. Something can be 
pleaded in mitigation. He was not, as is 
sometimes asserted, guilty of unfaithful- 
ness to any principles of toleration of his 
own. Farel expressed his master's thought 
as well as his own, in one of the letters to 
Calvin in which he clamored for the death 
of the heretic. " Because the Pope con- 
demns believers for the crime of heresy, 
because passionate judges inflict on the 
innocent the punishments which heretics 
deserve, it is absurd to conclude from this 
that the latter ought not to be put to 
death as a protection to the faithful. For 
my part, I have often declared myself 
ready to die, if I had taught anything con- 
trary to sound doctrine, and that I should 
be worthy of the most dreadful punish- 
ment if I were to turn any from the true 
faith of Christ ; and I cannot apply any 
different rule to other men." This point 
being established, the fatal conclusion fol- 
lowed ; for it is impossible to dispute that 
Servetus was a heretic of an aggravated 
and dangerous type. He was no mere un- 



214 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 



believer, but a theologian intense in bis 
convictions, with a plan for reconstructing 
theology, the church, and society, as set 
forth in his book of the "Restitutio 
Christianismi," or " Christianity Restored." 
And since he was a theologian of that pe- 
riod, it is needless to add that his manner 
of expressing his views was acrimonious 
and insulting to all antagonists, both Cath- 
olic and Protestant. Taking his career 
altogether, he does not appear to advan- 
tage in the figure of a martyr of free 
thought and fidelity to conviction, under 
which some would fain present him to us. 
But admitting that according to the 
principles universally accepted in that age 
the execution of Servetus was justifiable, 
we are still far from any adequate vindica- 
tion of the course pursued by Calvin in the 
affair. One of the latest contributions to 
the debate, and one of the fairest and 
most thorough, is to be found in Mr. 
Amedee Roget's Histoire da Peuple de 
Geneve. Geneva is a very hive of busy 
antiquaries, among whom Mr. Roget is 
distinguished for his patient exactness. 
As a man of orthodox sympathies, he can- 
not be impeached of prejudice against 
Calvin. I think that his judgment in 
the case, delivered in view of important 
evidence that was not known to all his 



THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 215 

predecessors, is not likely to be reversed. 
Says Mr. Roget : 

"The punishment of Servetus, consid- 
ered in itself, leaves no very dark stigma 
on the reformer's character. But on moral 
principles that are the same in every age, 
Calvin stands condemned for having de- 
nounced Servetus to the Catholic Inquisi- 
tion by the use of confidential papers, and 
for having delivered the unfortunate fu- 
gitive to the Geneva magistrates, when he 
was on his way to try his fortune in Italy. 
Granted that Calvin was in the line of his 
duty when he kept guard, in his way 
(which was the way of his age), for the 
security of the reformed churches. Had 
he any charge over the police of consciences 
in Catholic countries ? Neither can we 
accept as natural, or compatible with a 
Christian spirit, the hard heart with which 
the reformer expresses himself to the end 
with regard to his rival, without so much 
as a moment's softening at the sight of the 
scaffold." * 

* A still later volume contributed to the literature. of 
this controversy is entitled "Servetus and Calvin; a 
Study of an Important Epoch in the Early History of the 
Reformat ion. 1 ' By R. Willis, M.D., London. It is an inter- 
esting book; ambitious in style, and diligently prepared ; 
but adds little to the work of previous authors, especially 
of Tollin, French pastor at Magdeburg, who has made 
Servetus his life-study. With the recent work of Mr. 
Roget, and with Punjer's De Michaelis Serveti Doctrina 
Commentatio, Dr. Willis does not seem to have been ac- 
quainted. His volume is affected both by the furor bio- 
graphicus and by the odium theologicum. It is not easy to 
make a first-class martyr to the truth, of a man who 
iied so easily under oath as Servetus, and who professed 
before tbe Inquisition his prompt readiness to renounce 
all his cherished convictions; and a cool judgment will 
decline to follow Dr. Willis in elevating him above Calvin 
and Luther as a theologian. Dr. Willis will be surprised to 



216 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

Let us make every concession that the 
case admits. Doubtless Calvin was serious- 
ly anxious to prevent the propagation of 
destructive error. Probably the case of 
Servetus was complicated with political 
plots for the overthrow of Calvin and his 
work. Certainly the reformer made some 
motion to procure the commutation of the 
penalty to a less dreadful form of death. 
We will try to believe, even, what he tried 
to make himself believe, that there was no 
spark of human vindictiveness in all his 
efforts to compass the death of the man 
with whom he had for years been exchang- 
ing every sort of acrimonious insult. This 
is about all that can be said. But against 

be accused of a theological spirit, having, doubtless, the 
prevailing impression that it is only Christian writers 
that are liable to this affection, and that disbelievers 
are necessarily safe from it. But his scornful ignorance 
of theological history and nomenclature betrays him 
into some strange blunders. The most remarkable of 
these is that of claiming for his hero the original inven- 
tion of the " double sense of prophecy," which ap- 
plies the words of the prophet primarily to a near event, 
and secondarily to a remoter one ; and he illustrates 
this at much length from Servetus 1 edition of Pagnini's 
Bible, by instances which, he is sure, must have roused 
the orthodox rage of Calvin. If he had taken the pains 
to turn to Calvin's Commentaries, he would have found 
these identical expositions given to many of the same 
texts ! As to the principle which strikes him as so bold 
a novelty in Servetus, he will find it as far back as Theo- 
dore of Mopsuestia, not to say as far back as ihe Apos- 
tolic Fathers. Theology may be a very unworthy study, 
out after all it is well to know something about it before 
undertaking to write on theological subjects. Dr. Willis's 
slip-up on such a matter as this tends to discredit that 
splendid air of omniscience with which he sweeps away 
all remaining doubt as (for instance) to the date of the 
prophets, and the authorship of the fourth gospel. 



THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 217 

this we have before our eyes those fatal 
letters of Calvin's confidential friend, De 
Trie, which show the reformer in the act of 
furnishing the proofs to convict his antag- 
onist before the cruel tribunal at Vienne, 
in France, and the sentence of that court 
predicated upon seventeen letters furnished 
by John Calvin, preacher at Geneva. We 
have that letter to Farel, of seven years 
before, in which, speaking of Servetus's 
offer to come on to Geneva, if Calvin 
wished, to discuss certain subjects with 
him, he says: "I shall make him no 
promises, for if he comes, and if I have any 
influence in the city, I shall see to it that 
he does not get out of it alive." We have 
Calvin's own avowal that the arrest of the 
furtive sojourner and the relentless prose- 
cution that followed were of his instigation. 
We have the official record and Calvin's 
own version of the bitter, bitter wranglings 
between himself and the prisoner in the 
presence of the judges, and of his last in- 
terview with the condemned, on the eve of 
execution, in which he shows himself to 
the last the same fierce dogmatizer. And 
finally, we have his writing in self -vindi- 
cation, when the dreadful scene was over, 
in which he taunts his dead adversary with 
not having formally restated, in the article 



218 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

of death, the doctrines for which he hero- 
ically perished, and seizes on his dying 
prayers as a proof that he had no sincerity 
in his opinions. It is in this same paper 
that he recites the appearance of Servetus, 
when his punishment was announced to 
him: "When the news was brought to 
him, he seemed at intervals like one 
stunned. Then he sighed so that the whole 
room resounded. Anon, he began to howl 
like a mad man. In short, he had no more 
composure than one possessed. Towards the 
end he got to crying so that he beat his 
breast incessantly, bellowing, in his Spanish 
fashion, ' Misericordia ! misericordia ! ' " 
Through all these dismal documents, not 
one syllable of tenderness or human pity, 
unless it is in that letter to Fare], of the 
20th of August, in which he says: "I 
hope he will be sentenced to death, but I 
wish that they may mitigate the horror of 
his punishment." 

The prevailing motive that impelled the 
burning of Servetus was not less honorable 
than that which stirred in the bosoms of 
Caiaphas and the Sanhedrim on an occasion 
not in all respects unlike: "It is expedient 
that one man die for the people." Here 
was a golden opportunity for vindicating 
the reformed churches from that reproach 



THE USE OP FAGOTS AT GENEVA. SI 9 

of latitudinarianism that was thrown upon 
them by the Catholics. Thus wrote the 
pastors of Zurich when officially consulted 
on the matter by the Geneva magistrates : 
"We think it needful to show great rigor 
against him, and all the more as our 
churches are decried, in distant parts, as 
heretical, or as lending protection to here- 
tics. Divine Providence now offers an 
opportunity to purge yourselves, and us at 
the same time, of an unjust accusation." 
It is a curious fact, repeatedly illustrated 
in ecclesiastical history, that persecuted 
heretics commonly seek to vindicate them- 
selves from the charge of heresy by perse- 
cuting other heretics still more heretical. 
In the present case the fact has a double 
illustration ; for among those who have 
given their strong approbation to the exe- 
cution of Servetus is the most unexpected 
name of Dr. Jerome Bolsec, who had been 
hunted out of Geneva in peril of his life by 
the same John Calvin, for his unsoundness 
on predestination. He attempts to settle 
this account with his adversary by a " Life 
of Calvin " which is the reverse of a pane 
gyric. But he protests therein: "I do not 
write these things out of any displeasure 
at the death of such a monstrous and 
stinking heretic as Servetus; I wish that 



220 THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 

all his like were exterminated and the 
church of our Lord well purged of such 
vermin." 

This name of Bolsec brings to mind the 
story of his trial, the documents of which 
have lately been printed in full by another 
Geneva antiquary, Mr. Henry Fazy, and 
prove that the austere severity of Calvin 
in the case of Servetus was no solitary 
lapse under unwonted temptation, for his 
pursuit of Bolsec, if less fatal in its result, 
was not less truculent. 

A century and a half ago, that malicious 
wit, Voltaire, who never knew how to do a 
generous thing without mixing it with a 
malignant stab at somebody, paraded the 
Servetus story in its worst light, by way of 
exhibiting Protestants as equally intolerant 
with Catholics. One of the most eminent 
of the Geneva pastors, Vernet, set himself 
to the task of refutation, and made appli- 
cation to the city council for access to the 
official documents, which at that time were 
under lock and key. He was surprised at 
the delays and discouragements which he 
encountered. The syndic Calandrini ad- 
vised him that silence seemed wiser than 
anything that could be said. Vernet 
begged that at least three questions which 
he wished to put might be answered from 



THE USE OF FAGOTS AT GENEVA. 221 

the documents, and pressed his petition 
with some importunity. He received at 
last a letter from the syndic, of which he 
could not complain as wanting in explicit- 
ness. It ran on this wise: "The council 
considers it important, that the criminal 
procedure against Servetus should not be 
made public, and does not wish it to be 
communicated to any person whatever, 
either in whole or in part. The conduct of 
Calvin and of the council was such that we 
wish it to be buried in profound oblivion. 
There is no defence for Calvin. Plead the 
state of your health in excuse for dropping 
a work which will either be damaging to 
religion, to the Reformation, and to the 
good fame of Geneva, or will be very un- 
faithful to the truth." 

More than a century has gone by, and 
the archives of Geneva, and many a sor- 
rowful document besides, are now accessible 
to every comer. But the advice of Syndic 
Calandrini to any one who would attempt 
the vindication, on this head, of the other- 
wise illustrious memory of Calvin, is as 
good advice to-day as it was then. 



THE AMERICAN CHURCH AND THE 
PRIMITIVE CHURCH 



THE AMERICAN CHURCH, 

AND THE 

PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 



The two commonest conceptions of the 
church among American Christians may be 
characterized as the Congregationalist view, 
and the Sectarian view— both of them radi- 
cally unscriptural and false. 

1. The Congregationalist view holds that 
a church is a company of believers gathered 
out of the Christian community by volun- 
tary association, and organized for worship 
and for other Christian duty. This view 
finds in every community of Christians as 
many churches as there are organized asso- 
ciations of this kind, and holds that every 
such congregation is an independent unit 
of sovereignty, owing duties of comity, 
courtesy, and fellowship to the rest, doubt- 
less, but each in itself a complete church. 
Seeking its warrant in the Scriptures, it 
plants itself with immense strength on the 
undeniable, constant usage of the New Tes- 
tament, which never speaks of ' ' the church" 



226 AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 

of a province, no matter how small the 
province may be, but always of " the 
churches." Little Achaia had no institu- 
tion called " the church of Achaia" ; but it 
had churches ; and so with Galatia. The 
little patch of Asia Minor, which is the 
New Testament Asia, had certainly more 
than seven churches, but no " church of 
Asia." Corinth had its own church ; and 
the harbor town of Corinth, Cenchreae, 
nine miles distant, had its own church, too. 
The point seems inexpugnably taken against 
those who would hold that the church is a 
provincial organization stretching over a 
considerable region and embracing many 
towns. 

But while holding this point so clearly, 
the adherents of this theory have resolutely 
blinked another point which is just as clear 
and constant, to wit : that the Scriptures, 
which never speak of the church of any 
province, equally refrain from speaking of 
the churches of a town. The Christians of 
a town multiply by thousands ; they are 
disturbed by mutual alienations and serious 
variations in opinion, and strong personal 
attachments to different leaders ; but they 
are always one church in that town ; and if 
a division seems to impend, the apostle dep- 
recates it with horror, saying, " I beseech 



AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 227 

you by the mercies of God, don't divide." 
All which is very unlike Congregationalism. 

2. But it is still more unlike the alterna- 
tive theory of Sectarianism; which holds 
not only that the Christian population of 
any town may properly be split up into dif- 
ferent parties without common organiza- 
tion, but also that each one of these par- 
ties, entering into confederation with a like 
party in other communities, becomes thus 
a constituent part of a church — not of the 
town church where it exists, but of a sect 
of Christians extended over a nation or a 
continent. For this national party of 
Christians it calls by the name Church ; 
though it is as far removed from anything 
known by that name in the New Testament 
as can well be imagined. In the dialect of 
the New Testament there are names dis- 
tinctly applied to the sort of organization 
which we commonly call by the name of 
church. It is spoken of there as a ffx^ ff M a 
or a ai'psGis. We shall inevitably go astray 
in all our reasonings on this subject unless 
we bear in mind that this prevalent Ameri- 
can use of the word church is one unknown 
to the Scriptures. 

And it is well to remark, in passing, that 
this misnomer is not in the least justified by 
the fact that some one or other of these 



228 AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 

schisms or heresies is disposed to insist 
with somewhat obtrusive emphasis on the 
undeniable fact that the others are not 
churches. Of course they are not churches 
— any of them. A party of Christians is 
not the church, any more than a party of 
citizens is the state — any more than the 
part of anything is the whole of it. 

3. And let me, in one more word, note a 
caution against one other misconception of 
the church, which I suspect to be prevalent 
— that the church of Christ is the sum of 
existing so-called churches, schisms, or (ac- 
cording to a favorite American euphemism) 
" denominations." According to the New 
Testament conception, the church is made 
up of the Christian people, not of Christian 
parties. It is " the communion of saints'* 
— not a congregation of a selection of the 
saints. It is ll the communion of saints," 
not the confederation of sects. The king- 
dom of Christ is the commonwealth of ail 
humble and holy souls. His reign is within 
them. 

Setting aside, thus, three untenable con- 
ceptions : (1) that a church is a club of 
Christians formed on some principle of selec- 
tion out of a Christian community ; (2) that 
a church is a sect of Christians constituted 
over a large region by the federation of 



AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 229 

such local clubs ; (3) that the church is the 
totality of sects ; — setting these aside, I pro- 
pose this as the true conception, that the 
church of any place is the whole common- 
wealth of the Christian people of that place. 
There have been many " notes of the 
church" proposed by Christians of various 
parties,— form of government, pedigree of 
ordination, purity of doctrine, universality 
of extent, — always with a view to this : 
that the application of them shall prove 
each man's party to be the only church, and 
shall leave the other parties outside of it. 
But it is not difficult in reading the Acts 
and letters of the Apostles to recognize this 
as the one trait of the church as they un- 
derstood it, that it was the fellowship of all 
the Christians. 

Now while I acknowledge most painful 
defects in the organization of our modern, 
and especially our American Christianity, 
and while I look with earnest hope, not 
unmixed with anxiety, at the many move- 
ments toward a better state of things, 
I confess a lack of complete and un- 
reserved sympathy with the lamentations 
that are often heard over the lost unity of 
the church, and with longings after a res- 
toration of unity. For I cannot bring my- 
self to account of the unity of Christ's 



230 AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 

church as of a thing that used to be, or a 
thing that ought to be attained in the fu- 
ture ; but as a thing that is — is ?iotv, as it 
was in the beginning and ever shall be. 
The religious affections of my heart fail to 
lay hold with any satisfaction on some frag- 
ment of a church which used to be one, and 
hopes to be one again. But I recognize 
and love, through all the ages and in every 
land, One Holy Catholic and Apostolic 
Church, the fellowship of all saints. 

And that which I acknowledge and love 
as I look abroad over the great scope of the 
world and of history, I do not fail to find 
when I look about me in whatever place I 
find my work appointed — the one church, 
the commonwealth of believers. To the 
service of this, and not of any fraction of 
it, however pure in doctrine, however scrip- 
tural or historical in ritual, however correct 
in form of organization, however imposing 
by the magnificence of its extension — to 
the service of the whole fellowship of be- 
lievers in the town in which I serve, I am 
devoted by the consecration that makes me 
the minister of Christ. 

I am quite ready for that impatient in- 
terruption complaining that all this is quite 
out of time and place — that whatever may 
once have been true, and whatever may 



AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 231 

even now be true in some communities, in 
the American city of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the church is no longer one, but is 
divided. Divided ? Yes, indeed. That 
which the Apostle Paul deprecated with 
earnest entreaty, adjuring the Christians of 
Corinth by the mercies of God that it should 
not be, has befallen us, that " there are 
divisions among us. ' ' Doubtless the Church 
of Christ in the American town is divided ; 
but it is a divided unit — it is not many 
units. It is a divided church— it is not 
many churches, even though in our debased 
modern dialect we may combine to call it 
so. The one Church of Christ in the 
American town does not need to be cre- 
ated. It needs only to be recognized, and 
to be manifested to the world. 

It needs to be recognized by its own mem- 
bers and ministers. It does not now offer 
itself to observation in any corporate form. 
It has no chief officer, the visible center of 
unity ; no organized council or presbytery 
consulting for its united interest ; no con- 
stitution or laws except the word of its 
Lord in the New Testament ; but, men 
and brethren, you who believe in the Holy 
Ghost, do you doubt — can you doubt, so 
long as they who pass from death to life are 
known by this that they love the brethren, 



232 AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 

—that in your own city, where you live 
and labor, the Church of Christ, one and 
indivisible, is a most solid reality ? — the 
Church, with its cementing power of mu- 
tual love, so sadly hindered by ignorances 
and misconceptions, and by the miserable 
divisive spirit of sectarian allegiance ; with 
its common zeal for its one Lord now 
wretchedly squandered in wasteful competi- 
tions ; with its craving needs and duties, 
so often forgotten by its ministers in their 
exorbitant sense of duty to a narrow parish 
or congregation ? Must you needs see this 
one Church of Christ before you can be- 
lieve? Have you no sense of paramount 
loyalty and duty to the whole body of 
Christ's disciples, but only a little gush of 
sentiment, when you have given the devo- 
tion of your heart and the strength of your 
manhood to the supreme service of the 
party of Christians whose fortunes you are 
pushing with the spirit of a baseball game, 
as if the " emulations" which Paul con- 
demns as works of the flesh were the very 
fruits of the Holy Spirit ? 

And just because I have small respect for 
that love for the one church which expends 
itself wholly in sentimental words, I bring 
the matter down to a most practical illus- 
tration : 



AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 233 

From year to year, as the midsummer re- 
turns, is renewed the annual reproach of 
the American Church. In city after city, 
town after town, as the season of discom- 
fort, danger, and sickness comes on, the 
Christian ministers, with the honorable ex- 
ception of one great communion, and with 
certain individual exceptions beside, will, 
as a body, simultaneously forsake their 
charge, and leave the city deserted of its 
resident pastors. And each man speaking 
for himself will say, and say truly, that he 
leaves with the consent of his congregation, 
and that so far as his congregation is con- 
cerned this is the best time for him to take 
his needful rest. And no man will con- 
sider that each man is member of a college 
of clergy having charge of the common in- 
terests of the church of the whole town. 
If once the individual minister should learn 
to recognize in his own heart that the one 
church of the one Lord in his town was a 
most solemn reality, and that he was not 
merely the one pastor of his little fold of 
the flock, but also one of the company of 
the pastors of the whole flock, this annual 
scandal would at once begin to be abated. 

This point simply by way of illustration 
of what might follow from the mere recog- 
nition in each man's heart and conscience 



234 AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 

of the doctrine of the Scriptures concern- 
ing the unity of believers, and the solid 
spiritual fact that they not only ought to 
be one, but are one. 

And when I have said that the unity of 
the town church ought to be recognized by 
its ministers and members, I need hardly 
add that it ought to be manifested to the 
world. Being acknowledged in the indi- 
vidual mind and conscience, it certainly 
would be manifested, and that would be ful- 
filled which was spoken by the Lord from 
heaven, that the believers should be one, 
that the world might know that the Father 
had sent the Son. Whether that would 
come to pass which certainly did come to 
pass early in the primeval history of the 
church, that the town church should be 
represented by the town bishop at the head 
of the town clergy, — this might be — or 
might not be. But somehow or other the 
one church would find its voice, to which 
the world would love to listen. 

Even now, he that hath ears to hear may 
hear what the Bride saith as well as what 
the Spirit saith. Every Christian town 
has its speaking monuments not only of 
the ' ' competitive Christianity" which di- 
vides us, but of the common Christianity 
in which we unite. Every office of charity 



AMERICAN CHURCH AND PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 235 

organization is a head -quarters of the one 
church ; and every individual charity from 
which is wholly eliminated the leaven of 
partizanship, so that, undertaken in the 
common love of Christ, and aiming at the 
common good of all for whom Christ died, 
it delights in putting glory on Christ him- 
self and his whole church, is a work of the 
one church. 

For the manifestation of the one church 
of their town, how good a work could be 
wrought by any two or three Christian 
men, who in a spirit wholly purified from 
partizanship should simply publish from 
year to year, with growing completeness, 
the Year-Book of the Church of Christ in 
that place, which should exhibit in love 
and holy pride and exultation the roster of 
its clergy and its meetings, and the works 
which each year are wrought there, through 
the divided congregations and the sharply 
competing sects, in the name of Cod's 
holy Child, Jesus ! Such a record, with- 
out one word of comment, would itself be 
a potent testimony to the general con- 
science, for Christ and his Church. 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE 
CHURCH, 



The author of the ' ' Thirteen Historical 
Discourses on the First Church in New 
Haven"* vindicates the authority of that 
church, organized by mutual agreement in 
a meeting of the Christian people of the 
colony, by analogy with the civil govern- 
ment of the colony, organized in like man- 
ner, about the same time. After describ- 
ing the " plantation-covenant/' under which 
as a provisional government the colonists 
lived for fourteen months, the author records 
the meeting in Mr. Newman's barn, the 
framing of the church and of the state, the 
choosing of the " seven pillars," and finally 
the election and ordination of the church 
officers. He then proceeds as follows : — 

"The question doubtless arises with some — 
Could such an ordination have any validity, or 



* Thirteen Historical Discourses on the completion of Two 
Hundred Years from the Beginning of the First Church in 
New Haven. By Leonard Bacon. New Haven, 1838. 



240 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

confer on the pastor thus ordained any authority ? 
Can men, by a voluntary compact, form themselves 
into a church ? and can the church thus formed 
impart to its own officers the power of administer- 
ing ordinances ? If Davenport had not been pre- 
viously ordained in England, would not his ad- 
ministration of ordinances have been sacrilege ? 
Answer me another question : How could the 
meeting which convened in Mr. Newman's barn, 
originate a commonwealth ? How could the com- 
monwealth thus originated impart the divine 
authority and dignity of magistrates to officers of 
its own election ? How could a few men coming 
together here in the wilderness, without commis- 
sion from king or parliament, by a mere volun- 
tary compact among themselves, give being to a 
state ? How can the state thus instituted have 
power to make laws that shall bind the minority ? 
What right had they to erect tribunals of justice ? 
What right to wield the sword ? What right to 
inflict punishment, even to death, upon offenders ? 
Is not civil government a divine institution, as 
really as baptism and the Lord's supper ? 13 not 
the ' duly constituted ' magistrate as truly the 
minister of God, as he who presides over the 
church, and labors in word and doctrine ? Whence 
then came the authority with which that self-con- 
stituted state, meeting in Mr. Newman's barn, in- 
vested its elected magistrates ? It came directly 
from God, the only fountain of authority. Just 
as directly from the same God, came the authority 
with which the equally self -constituted church, 
meeting in the same place, invested its elected pas- 
tor. Could the one give to its magistrates power 
to hang a murderer in the name of God — and could 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 241 

not the other give to its elders power to adminis- 
ter baptism."* 

The argument thus popularly stated is 
sharply conclusive ad liominem against those 
who hold the popular statement as to the 
sanction of civil government. The Ameri- 
can idea of the state implies the American 
idea of the church. The parity of reason- 
ing betwixt the two is perfect. 

But the analogy here drawn is good for 
much more than this. It has only to be 
cleared of expressions which point its imme- 
diate application to a particular class of 
gainsayers, to furnish a theorem by which, 
reasoning from sound principles in civil pol- 
ity, we may discover fallacies, and establish 
the truth, in ecclesiastical polity. For sev- 
eral reasons, let us take the particular in- 
stance quoted above as the text of our whole 
discussion : first, because the argument 
will be clearer if stated in relation to a par- 
ticular instance ; secondly, because almost 
the only cases in which history distinctly 
discloses, side by side, the origin and earli- 
est processes of civil and of ecclesiastical 
government, are this and like cases in early 
American history ; thirdly, because the pas- 
sage quoted has actually been, in the mind 

* Bacon's Historical Discourses, pp. 41, 42. 



242 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

of the present writer, the germ out of which 
his argument has grown. 

At the outset, let us guard against one 
source of misapprehension which will be 
more effectually obviated as the discussion 
proceeds. The church and commonwealth 
of New Haven Colony did not originate in 
the meeting in Mr. Newman's barn. They 
had existed at least fourteen months already. 
The " Two Hundred Years from the Be- 
ginning of the First Church in New Haven/' 
which are commemorated in these discourses, 
date from the landing of the colonists, not 
from the mutual compact. And the civil 
state was coeval with the church. So that 
when it comes to strictness of speech, the 
question, Can men by voluntary compact 
form themselves into a church? — and the 
other question, Could the meeting in Mr. 
Newman's barn originate a commonwealth ? 
are to be answered (so far as the present in- 
stance shows) in the negative. That meet- 
ing could not create what was already in 
existence.* What the meeting did was to 
organize both the church and the State. 
According to " Congregational usage" this 
is the same thing with originating them ; 

* That this is the view accepted by the author of the " Dis- 
courses" is sufficiently implied both in the title-page and in 
the preface of the volume. 



FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH, 243 

but according to the exact use of the Eng- 
lish language it is something different. 

Coming now to the question, What was 
the origin of the New Haven Colony Com- 
monwealth and Church? and What were 
the source and channel of their authority, 
if any they had ? — there is room for five 
different answers, according as the respond- 
ent holds one or another of five different 
theories of polity, civil and ecclesiastical. 
Let us name them : 

I. The Papal Theory. 
II. The Bourbon Theory. 

III. The Formal Theory. 

IV. The Jacobin Theory. 

V. The Rational and Scriptural 
Theory. 

I. The Papal Theory. 

It is a ' * fundamental principle of the 
papal canon law, that the Roman pontiff is 
the sovereign lord of the whole world ; and 
that all other rulers in church and state 
have so much power as he sees fit to allow 
them to have." Under this principle, the 
popes have claimed the power ' ' not only of 
conferring benefices, but also of giving away 
empires, and likewise of divesting kings and 
princes of their crowns and authority." * 

* Murdock's Mosheim, vol. ii., p. 340. 



244 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

The theory thus set forth is a very sim- 
ple and intelligible one, and its application 
to the case in hand is nowise doubtful. The 
heathen territory of New England had been 
disposed of long before the Puritan migra- 
tion by the gift of a pope to a Catholic 
prince,* and therefore whatever claim of 
jurisdiction should be set up within that 
territory by any body of colonists, whether 
in the name of a charter from a heretic 
power, or under color of a purchase from 
the barbarous tribes in possession, or under 
pretense of a so-called inherent right of self- 
government, must be simply an intrusion 
and a usurpation. It would be not only de- 
void of right in itself, but a violation of the 
divine right of the pope's grantee. 

In like manner, any assumption of the 
functions of the church or ministry in this 
colony, otherwise than through the ways 
appointed by the head of the church, would 
be void and invalid, and therefore sacri- 
legious. Furthermore, it would be schis- 
matic, as intruding a separate church au- 
thority within a territory and population 
already placed under the special spiritual 
jurisdiction of some bishop, or if not so 
placed, then remaining under the imme- 
diate pastoral care of the bishop of Rome. 

* Bancroft's 17. S., vol. i., p. 10. 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH, 245 

Obviously, according to this theory, the 
first step for the colonists to take to secure 
a regular and valid government, in church 
and state, is to become reconciled to the 
Catholic Church. 

II. The Bourbon Theory. This the- 
ory agrees with the first mentioned in de- 
claring all lawful authority, civil and eccle- 
siastical, to be derived from God through a 
continuous succession of men. It differs 
from it in this : that whereas the former 
holds that there is but one line of this suc- 
cession — the line of the popes— and that to 
all rightful secular and spiritual rulers, in 
any generation, their authority flows through 
the pope for the time being : — the present 
theory holds that the lines of succession are 
not one, but several ; that from the original 
conferment, authority and " validity" de- 
scend along these lines, in secular matters 
through an hereditary succession, in spir- 
itual matters through a tactual succession ; 
that the power of the sceptre and sword, or 
the power of the keys, as it is not derivable 
from the subjects thereof, so is not defeasi- 
ble by them ; and that the question of title 
to authority, civil or ecclesiastical, is a sim- 
ple question of pedigree.* According to 

* See Macaulay's History of England, Chap. I. 



246 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

this theory, the powers of the state centre 
in the sovereign. The king, not the pope, 
is "the fountain of honor." " U'etat, c'est 
moi" says the Bourbon ; " Ecclesia in 
Ejriscopo," responds the high-churchman. 

In its two applications, to church and to 
state, the lines of argument by which this 
theory is sustained are very nearly equal 
and parallel. The state is a divine institu- 
tion, and so is the church. The ministers 
of the one are divinely commissioned, and 
so of the other. There are difficulties ob- 
jected in either case to any other external 
credentials of the divine commission than 
the credentials of succession from former 
ministers. Those whose claims to authority 
have been founded, exclusively or mainly, 
on hereditary or tactual relation to their 
predecessors, have been in a multitude of 
cases, and for many centuries almost uni- 
versally, approved as lawful rulers and bish- 
ops. The two applications of the theory are 
analogous, not only by parity of reasoning, 
but by parity of unreasonableness : for in 
either case it is easier to show the several 
links of the succession than it is to demon- 
strate any law of cohesion by which they be- 
come a chain, or, the chain being complet- 
ed, to hitch it fast to the original divine 
commission. It may fairly enough be ad- 



FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH. 247 

mitted that the warrant for ecclesiastical 
power in apostolic succession, is as well ac- 
credited, on the whole, as the warrant of 
the hereditary divine right of kings. 

Applying this theory to the case in hand, 
we find that the only right for the exercise 
of government which the settlers of New 
England generally possessed, was such as 
was conferred on them by charter from the 
king of England. Under such charter, if 
it was broad enough, all the functions of 
government might be exercised by the local 
magistrates in the name of the king. For 
lack of such authority, the legislative and 
judicial acts of the New Haven colonists 
were null and void. The only way in which 
regular and valid independent government 
could be set up in the little province of 
Quinipiac, would be for the colonists to im- 
port the regularly descended heir of some 
Lord's Anointed, — an Otho, or a grand 
duke Maximilian — and graft their wild olive 
with a slip of a Stuart or a Bourbon. 

Likewise in spiritual matters, Davenport 
and Hooke might exercise such spiritual 
functions as their ordination to the priest- 
hood by English bishops would authorize, 
but could acquire no new prerogative from 
any act of a self- constituted church. The 
way of maintaining the functions of the 



243 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

church from generation to generation, was 
to obtain other priests and deacons from the 
ordaining hands of the Bishop of London 
(whose modest diocese was understood by a 
mild fiction of law to include a large part 
of the Western hemisphere) ; or to secure, 
either from the lords spiritual of England, 
or from the cracked succession of the Scotch 
episcopate, the gift of a bishop with a pedi- 
gree sixteen hundred years long, whose 
should be all the rights of ecclesiastical sov- 
ereignty, to have and to hold, and to trans- 
mit to his assigns forever. Both these 
methods were practised successively by a 
few dissidents in the subsequent days of Xew 
Haven ; by virtue of which they became 
the real church of the colony, having the 
only " valid" and authorized ministry. For 
neglect of these, the body of Christian peo- 
ple in the commonwealth became schismatics 
and aliens from the church, and their so- 
called ministers became guilty (so we are 
assured) of the sin of Korah and of Dathan 
and Abiram. 

III. The Formal Theoby. — This the- 
ory appears under very different phases of 
development, and is held by very different 
parties of civil and ecclesiastical politicians. 
It is that the legitimacy, validity, or author- 



FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH. 249 

ity of a church or of a state are determined 
by the form of its structure. There are 
jure-divino monarchists, jure-divino repub- 
licans, and jure-divino democrats. So also, 
there are jure-divino tri -ordinary episco- 
palians, jure-divino presbyterians, and jure- 
divino congregationalists. 

According to the first classes in these two 
lists, the state government in the Colony of 
New Haven was hopelessly vitiated because 
it did not constitute Mr. Eaton ruler dur- 
ing his life, and the head of an hereditary 
dynasty : the church polity was ruined, be- 
cause the pastor, the teacher, and the ruling 
elder, instead of being in three ranks in a 
line of promotion, were all in one rank. 
And so, to the other classes, the colonial 
church and state must stand or fall, in re- 
spect to their divine sanction, according as 
they agree with or vary from a supposed 
" pattern showed to Moses in the mount/' 
They came into being, as divine institu- 
tions, in the act of conforming themselves 
to the Scriptural model ; or if not so con- 
formed, they never did come into existence 
at all.* 



* For gome severe animadversions against this test of 
churchhood— against " the whims of theoretic Biblists" and 
their "text-made churches," see Isaac Taylor's Wesley and 
Methodism, pp. 199-202. 



250 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

IV. The Jacobik Theory.— This the- 
ory represents the body politic or ecclesias- 
tic as originating out of the unorganized and 
unassociated materials of human society, by 
a "social compact" or " covenant," in 
which all the individuals agree, for the 
common advantage, to surrender to the new 
organization — the state, or the church — 
sundry of their individual rights and pow- 
ers, to form the common stock of authority 
for the corporation. " The whole body is 
supposed, in the first place, to have unani- 
mously consented to be bound by the reso- 
lutions of the majority ; that majority, in 
the next place, to have fixed certain funda- 
mental regulations ; and then to have con- 
stituted, either in one person, or in an as- 
sembly, a standing legislature."* 

According to this theory, the colonists of 
New Haven, from the time when they came 
out from under the authority of the ship's 
captain, at least until the close of their first 
day of fasting and prayer, when they formed 
their provisional "plantation covenant," 
were "in a state of nature." They were 
not a community, but only the individuals 
who might become a community whenever 

* Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy, Book VI., chap- 
ter 3. See also Emmons's Scriptural Platform of Church 
Government. 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 251 

they should agree to act in common. They 
were not society, but only the raw materials 
of society. There was neither a common- 
wealth nor a church among them, but only 
the possibility of these. By-and-by they 
concluded to have a state and a church, 
and so they got together in a barn and cre- 
ated them, appointing officers with divine 
authority for administering the functions of 
the two institutions — authority which up to 
that time had not existed in the colony. 
Before that, the execution of a malefactor 
would have been an act of murder, — either 
of private revenge or of mob-violence. De- 
fensive hostilities against the Indians would 
have been simply the fighting of every man 
proprio Marte, except so far as indi- 
viduals might have chosen to club together 
according to their preference for leaders. 
But any exercise of command on the part 
of him to whom the instincts of the people 
should turn as their natural military leader, 
or any attempt to coerce the shirks and the 
cowards into the common defence, would 
have been an act of tyranny and usurpa- 
tion, there having been no unanimous mu- 
tual agreement of the colonists to concede 
their individual rights to this extent. And 
when, after experiencing the inconveniences 
of the " state of nature/' the colonists be- 



252 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

gan to frame their covenant, there was no 
right among them to compel into the ar- 
rangement any individual who preferred, at 
his own risk, to live among them but not of 
them, as a quiet and peaceable outlaw. The 
uncovenanted citizen might be derelict of a 
moral duty in thus standing aloof from the 
mutual engagements of the rest, but the 
powers arising out of these mutual agree- 
ments of ninety- nine of the population 
could not extend over the one -hundredth 
man who had declined to be a party to the 
compact. 

Just so the Christian people of the colony 
were not a church, but only Christian indi- 
viduals. The administration of baptism or 
the Lord's Supper, before the covenant, 
would have been, if not sacrilegious, at least 
a grave irregularity, and an infraction of 
Congregational order. The endeavor of 
them that were spiritual to restore by re- 
monstrance and admonition a wandering 
brother, would have been the meddling of 
individuals in that which they had nothing 
to do with. The individual would not have 
been bound to submit to it ; for ' ' the obli- 
gation to submit arises from the bond of 
the covenant,"* and he had never made 

* See Emmons, who is beautifully explicit on this point. 
Scr. Platform, pp. 5, 7, 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 253 

any such contract with his Christian neigh- 
bors. Any attempt to report the recusant 
in the weekly meeting of believers would 
have been both impertinent and futile ; for 
the man never agreed to suffer any such use 
of his name, and the stated meeting of Chris- 
tians is not a church, to " tell it to," be- 
cause the members of it have not formed a 
social compact. The exclusion of an obsti- 
nate offender from the communion of saints 
is a sheer impossibility, because the saints 
do not have any communion. They are 
men of grace in a " state of nature." If, 
at length, the colonists hold a meeting in 
Mr. Newman's barn to arrange the terms of 
an association for mutual care, and contrive 
a covenant which should confer on the 
members and officers of the institution the 
divine right of enforcing a contract, it is 
optional with those who find themselves in- 
commoded by too much " watch-care," 
whether they will enter into this covenant, 
or whether they will remain as lookers on, 
or whether they will form a little separate 
mutual covenant among themselves. 

V. The Rational and Scriptural 
Theory. — This theory, as applied to the 
civil state, avoids encountering the hypo- 
thetical difficulties suggested in what we 



m 

254 -' FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

have sailed the Jacobin theory, by simply 
recognizing the facts of human nature. 
The questions whether an aggregation of 
human beings living together without any 
mutual interests or intercourse is a com- 
munity or commonwealth ; — whether " in- 
dividuals are a civil society before they have 
formed themselves into one," — whether 
" unconnected individuals, before they have 
laid themselves under a mutual engage- 
ment" * are the subjects of any common 
authority— are futile questions : as if one 
should ask whether a pile of quicksilver 
globules would constitute a pool of quick- 
silver before being flattened down ; know- 
ing that it is the nature of globules of quick- 
silver, not to stand in a pile like cannon- 
balls, but to flow together upon contact. 
A battue of lions in an inclosure is not a 
herd of lions, no matter what discipline you 
may put them under, for the lion is not a 
gregarious animal. But a collection of 
horses or of sheep is a herd, or a flock, at 
once, without waiting to adjust the terms 
of an agreement, or to secure the valid in- 
vestiture or ascertain the pedigree of the 
bellwether, because horses and sheep are 
gregarious. You do not have to constitute 

* Emmons, Script. Platform, p. 4. 



FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH. 255 

them a herd, — they are a herd. Just so, if 
you gather human beings together in a sepa- 
rate population, you do not have to make 
society out of them. They are society, he- 
cause man is a social animal. And wher- 
ever human society is, there are to be found, 
either potentially or in actual exercise, all 
the divine power and authority of the 
State. 

And all the questions that are raised 
among the other conflicting theories of the 
State, as to the conditions, channel and 
credentials of divine authority residing in 
the rulers of the State, are shortly disposed 
of, according to the rational and Scriptural 
view, by recurring to that fundamental 
maxim, " The powers that be are ordained 
of God." The government de facto, by 
virtue of its being the poiver, is charged by 
the Divine ruler with the responsibility of 
administering justice in the land, and is 
entitled to be respected and obeyed accord- 
ingly. This is the sole condition on which 
divine authority is conferred on the govern- 
ment of any country — that it he the govern- 
ment. With this agrees the maxim, in its 
only true meaning, that " all governments 
derive their just powers from the consent 
of the governed ;" since if this consent, 
whether voluntary or coerced, active or pas- 



256 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

sive, is withdrawn, the power that was is no 
longer the power, and God does not ordain 
the impotencies. Without the actual pos- 
session of the power, no degree of de jure 
11 validity" amounts to a divine commis- 
sion ; — not bulls from a pope, nor pedigrees 
running back to King David himself, nor 
any degree of ideal perfection in the struc- 
ture of constitution, nor any certificates of a 
social compact in a mass-meeting. But, 
the power being present, not the absence of 
any or all of these conditions can discharge 
the de facto government of its responsibility, 
nor release the individual from his duty of 
subjection and obedience. Of course this 
statement is not to be interpreted to mean 
that all methods of acquiring civil power 
are right, nor that there is no preference 
among forms of government ; neither is it 
to be applied to the exclusion of the duty of 
disobedience to laws requiring sin, or of the 
right of revolution. But properly inter- 
preted and applied, this view of civil duty 
and authority is the settled result of Chris- 
tian ethics. 

Moreover, there always is an " existing 
power," residing in every community of 
men, latent if not active, which, whenever 
on any emergency it is called into exercise 
for the punishment of crime or the protec- 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 257 

tion of innocence, carries with it the sanc- 
tion of God. 

Applying these principles to the case of 
the New Haven Colony, we find that before 
the " constituent assembly " in the barn, 
before the " plantation-covenant," the col- 
ony was already a state ; * and so any male- 
factor who should have presumed upon 
prevalent social theories to violate public or 
private rights or religious duties at that 
early period, would summarily have found 
it to be. His judgment would not a long 
time have lingered, nor his condemnation 
have slumbered, waiting for a social com- 
pact to confer the authority of a magistrate. 

The divine right of government residing 
in the little commonwealth, might have 



* "If a ship at sea should lose all its officers, or a ship- 
wrecked crew be cast upon a desert island, this little commu- 
nity would then stand in the condition of a State. The whole 
would have the right to restrain and constrain each one for 
the freedom of all.'" — Hickok's Moral Science, p. 219. 

It is necessary to guard against confusion between a State 
and a State government. The State government is the out- 
growth or ordinance of the State. But, by a natural me- 
tonymy, the word State is often used to mean the government. 

The students of " the judicious Hooker'' will remember 
a passage in the "Ecclesiastical Polity" strikingly parallel 
co the above from President Hickok. It may seriously be doubt- 
ed whether Hooker, if he had found himself in New England, 
would have felt that his principles allowed of the course of 
nonconformity and schism which has sometimes been pursued 
by those who call themselves his disciples and justify their 
practices by quoting his book. 



258 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

come into exercise and manifestation, in 
various ways. Successive emergencies might 
have occasioned successive acts of authority, 
nemine obstante, which might have become 
precedents for others, and so a body of com- 
mon law, and a sort of British Constitution, 
have grown up, without one act of deliber- 
ate legislation or foundation. The defer- 
ence toward Eaton might, either explicitly 
or by the general acquiescence, have com- 
mitted to him the supreme government of 
the colony, and at his death have trans- 
ferred it to his son. Or the long-continued 
pressure of military exigencies might have 
habituated the people to martial law and 
settled their military leader into the seat of 
general authority. All these modes of the 
origin of governmental institutions in the 
colony are imaginable ; and in any of them 
might have been inaugurated the power or- 
dained of God. The method of sitting down 
consciously and deliberately to contrive the 
institutions under which the inherent au- 
thority of the state should express itself, is 
doubtless a nobler way ; a way worthier of 
such matured and reflective minds as set up 
the pillars of the New Haven Colony — a 
way which has since become so exclusively 
the typical American way of organizing gov- 
ernment that we are tempted to think it the 



FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH. 259 

only way ; but it is not one whit more valid 
in conferring divine authority than the way 
practised in the insurrection on the slaver 
Amistad, when the tallest, nimblest and 
smartest negro in the lot elected himself 
captain and king, and exacted and received 
the obedience of the rest. 

Now bringing the force of this extended 
analogy to bear on our main subject of the 
origin and authority of the church, we see 
at once the futility of those questions 
whether a neighborhood of " visible saints" 
" living members of Christ," while " sepa- 
rate and unconnected," constitute a church 
of Christ ; * whether " a number of Chris- 
tians merely living in the same city, town 
or parish," f but having no common inter- 
ests, no mutual affections, no stated meet- 
ings, and holding themselves aloof from 
mutual intercourse, are a church. The 
questions are predicated on an unsupposable 
hypothesis. That is not the way in which 
" visible saints" live. When they try to 
live so, their sanctity becomes invisible at 
once. They are no more, " visible saints," 
but visibly unsanctified. " By this we know 
that we have passed from death unto life, 
because we love the brethren." The prob- 

* Scr. Platform, p. 3. .t Idem. p. 5, and passim. 



260 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

lem in theology that begins with supposing 
a neighborhood of Christians without mu- 
tual love and intercourse under the law of 
Christ, is as rational as a problem in mag- 
netism which should be founded on the sup- 
position of a collection of steel magnets 
having attraction toward the pole, but no 
attraction for each other. If, under the 
laws of human nature, human neighborhood 
implies human society, and human society 
implies the state ; then d fortiori, under 
the laws of the regenerated nature, Chris- 
tian neighborhood implies Christian society, 
and Christian society implies the church. 
The law of Christ concerning common and 
mutual Christian duties is already in force, 
and the authority of administering its earth- 
ly sanctions resides with the community of 
Christians.* 

As touching the credentials of govern- 
ment in the church, it is hard to see where- 

* It is amazing to see Dr. Emmons walking straight for- 
ward, with his eyes open, into the absurdity that the law of 
Christ begins to be binding on Christian disciples only when 
they have mutually agreed to be bound by it ; and, by impli- 
cation, that it is binding then only within the bodies that may 
be formed by " elective affinity," pp. 4, 5. 

Quite in accordance with the Doctor's exegesis of Matthew 
xviii. 15-17, is the common construction of the same passage, 
which holds it to be a sin to report an offending brother in the 
lecture-room of the church until after the " first and second 
steps," but holds it permissible to advertise him " at sight" in 
the religious newspapers. 



FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH. 261 

in the principle to be applied differs from 
that which obtains respecting civil govern- 
ment. Under the latter, the individual is 
required to " submit himself to the powers 
that be." Under the former, he is required 
to " obey them that have the rule over 
him/' In either case, the wide generality 
of the command, interpreted by the inspired 
absence of express instruction as to the 
method of appointing and inducting valid 
officers, points to a like conclusion : — that, 
under the necessary and obvious limitations, 
a de facto government, in church as in 
state, is entitled to the allegiance of its sub- 
jects. 

The illustration of this view by the in- 
stance of the New Haven Colony is so obvi- 
ous that it is needful only to hint the main 
points of it. The church which, according 
to the uniform laws of the Christian life, 
had crystallized out of the ship's company 
during the voyage, having only such slight, 
informal organization as the circumstances 
of that temporary mode of life required, 
was not dissolved when the colonists land- 
ed. It was the church authority subsisting 
among them already, which was expressed 
in the " plantation- covenant." When, 
afterward, the town was " cast into several 
private meetings wherein they that dwelt 



262 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHUKCH. 

most together gave their accounts one to 
another of God's gracious work upon them, 
and prayed together, and conferred to mu- 
tual edification/' and thus " had knowl- 
edge, one of another, ' ' and of the fitness of 
individuals for their several places, in the 
foundation- work, or in the superstructure* 
— it is possible that they supposed they were 
preparing to originate the church ; but it is 
plain to the looker-on that the very act of 
" casting the town into meetings" was an 
act of the church. And the action of the 
" constituent assembly" in the barn was, 
like the adoption of our present national con- 
stitution, not the founding of a new church 
or state, but the peaceful revolution of one 
already in being. The Constitution does 
not make the state ; the state makes the 
Constitution. 

If, within the territory occupied by the 
colony, a knot of theorizers on politics had 
conspired to form a separate mutual com- 
pact for civil government among them- 
selves, to use a different code of laws upon 
their members, and to secure a purer democ- 
racy or a legitimately descended ruler, the 
proper name for the act would have been 
sedition. Precisely so, when dissenters 

* Bacon's Historical Discourses, p. 19. 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 263 

from the colonial church did, for no griev- 
ance put upon their conscience, but simply 
in the prosecution of their church theories 
or prejudices, split themselves from the con- 
gregation, and refuse obedienoe to the exist- 
ing government— " to them that had the 
rule" — and insist on importing for their 
special use a hierarch in the regular succes- 
sion, the proper name for their act was 
schism. 

But, on the other hand, let it be confessed 
that if the colonial Church had undertaken 
to exclude from its fellowship Christian dis- 
ciples, for causes not demanding the cen- 
sure of the Church nor discrediting the 
profession of a Christian faith — if they had 
reversed the gospel principle, and proceed- 
ed on the notion that it is better that ten 
weak disciples should be excluded than that 
one deceiver should be admitted — if thus 
they had created outside of their com- 
munion a party of Christians whose only 
opportunity of fellowship was in a separate 
organization ; then the sin of schism would 
have rested on the heads not of the few, but 
of the many. The Church itself would 
have become schismatic. But it is fair to 
say that this does not seem to have been the 
sin of the churches of the first nor of the 
second generation, The general prevalence 



264 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH, 

of it in New England is comparatively 
modern. 

Objections to this Theory of the 
Church. — The objections to be levied 
against what we have called the Rational 
and Scriptural Theory of the Church will 
exactly correspond with those which have 
been raised, to no effect, against the anal- 
ogous theory of civil polity. They may be 
treated with great brevity. 

Objection 1. The principle proposed, of 
the duty of deference to the de facto govern- 
ment of the Christian community, cannot 
be accompanied with any distinct and defi- 
nite limitation, by which the occasional ex- 
ceptions in favor of disobedience or revolu- 
tion can be determined. 

The answer to this is to be found, not 
only in the parallel doctrine and objection 
in civil polity, but "in almost every part of 
ethical science." So rarely is the exact 
boundary between right and wrong to be 
distinctly defined in a formula — so gener 
ally are the final questions on the applica- 
tion of moral rules left open for the deci- 
sion of the individual conscience — that there 
is a prima facie presumption against any at- 
tempt to fix the course of right action on a 
point of morals by a formula of permanent 



FIVE THEOHIES OF THE CHURCH. 265 

and universal application.* The objection 
is a clear argument in our favor. 

Objection 2. Under the doctrine here laid 
down, it will be impossible to justify the 
Puritan separations from the Church of 
England. 

The first answer which we would make to 
this is that it is a small matter to answer 
it at all. The second, that a true judgment 
on those acts of separation must depend on 
the circumstances surrounding each act ; on 
the character of the parish church from 
which the separatists withdrew — whether it 
was Christian or unchristian ; on the na- 
ture of the grievances under which they 
labored, whether mere annoyances or actual 
burdens on the conscience ; on the proba- 
bility of bringing the body of the Christian 
disciples in that community into union 
under a purer rule. The third answer is 
that if it does condemn the secession of dis- 
senters from the Church of England, it 
thereby honors and confirms the judgment 
of our Puritan forefathers of the best and 
earliest age, almost all of whom, except the 
Pilgrims of Plymouth, abhorred the schism 
of the separatists with a holy horror. The 

* See the ample illustration of this matter, in its political 
bearing, in Macaulay's History of England, Vol. ii., pp. 103-5, 
Harper's 12mo edition. 



266 FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH 

fourth answer will be conclusive in many 
minds, — that the doubt which it throws over 
the Puritan separations in England is more 
than compensated by the discredit which it 
puts upon many of the Baptist, Episco- 
palian, and Methodist schisms in New 
England. 

Objection 3. This view discredits many 
of the local efforts for the propagation of 
Congregational institutions at the West and 
elsewhere, as schismatic. 

Answer, Very likely. 

Objection 4. This view brings in practi- 
cal difficulty and confusion, by making it 
often a matter of doubt what is the Church 
of Christ in any community, and where its 
government resides. 

Answer. This difficulty is not peculiar to 
the ecclesiastical application of the theory. 
It is of frequent occurrence in civil politics. 
Hardly ever is there a revolution or a con- 
siderable attempt at revolution, in which it 
does not become a very important and very 
perplexing question to some consciences — 
Which are " the powers that be ?" It is a 
question not only for the passive and indif- 
ferent, but for the active leaders of revolu- 
tion — first whether there is ground and need 
for revolution, and then whether the dissat- 
isfaction of the people, the incapacity of the 



FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 267 

administration, and the combination of 
favoring circumstances have or have not 
charged them with the potver, and with a 
trust for the redress of intolerable griev- 
ances, to the discharge of which they are 
ordained of God. Not to allude to ques- 
tions which often arose to perplex honest 
consciences during our own civil war, the his- 
tory of the mission of Dudley Mann to 
Hungary, in quest of a government to 
recognize, is one case in point. Another is 
the amusing story of Mr. John L. Stephens, 
whose Travel was never so full of Incidents 
as when, with a diplomatic commission in 
his pocket, he explored the various factions 
of a Spanish American republic, in search 
of the right government to which to pre- 
sent it.* 

It cannot invalidate the principle which 
we have enunciated, that such difficulties 
are more frequent in ecclesiastical politics 
than in civil. In secular matters, the neces- 
sities of society are such that the rival pre- 
tensions of different claimants to the su- 
preme government within the same terri- 
tory become a nuisance so odious as not to 
be tolerable for an indefinitely protracted 



* Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yu- 
catan. By Joan L. Stephens. 



268 FIVE THEORIES OP THE CHURCH. 

period ; and as for the settlement of these 
claims by allowing each claimant to govern 
its own partisans according to its own laws, 
the plan is so unnatural, so inimical to the 
peace of the community, that history has 
shown no disposition to repeat the solitary 
instance of it which is found in the present 
constitution of the Turkish empire, tem- 
pered though it is, in that instance, by the 
beneficent rigors of a supervising despotism. 
But the union and communion of all the 
Christian disciples of any community, in- 
stead of being, like political union, a neces- 
sity, is only a duty. Consequently when 
once factions have established themselves in 
the Christian commonwealth, there is no 
necessary limit to their continuance from 
year to year, and from generation to gen- 
eration. In the course of time the Chris- 
tian mind becomes so wonted, and the 
Christian conscience so seared, to the wrong 
and evil of schism, that the doctrine of the 
perpetuity of schism is accepted as an in- 
tegral part of the ' i evangelical scheme,' ' 
and the sacred name of the Church loses its 
proper meaning, of the commonwealth of 
God's people, and becomes synonymous with 
its old opposite, a aipeois or sect. The 
"problem of Christian union/' which in 
the beginning no one ever thought of call- 



FIVE THE0K1ES OP THE CHUKCH. 269 

ing a problem, is held to be soluble only by 
diplomatic dealings between these churches 
(which are not churches), or else by setting 
up in the vacant place formerly held by the 
church, a new institution — a Young Men's 
Christian Association, or a Catholic Basis 
City Tract Society — that shall be the centre 
of Catholic affection and the means of the 
communion of saints. 

In this state of a Christian neighborhood, 
doubtless the question, Where is the church ? 
is a difficult one. One thing about it is 
plain, that it is not to be settled by apply- 
ing worn-out tests, such as papal authority, 
apostolic succession, structural perfection, 
or democratic origin to any fragment of the 
schism, and determining that to be the 
Church. In some cases, it will appear that 
there is a Catholic church in the place, 
from which seditious spirits have torn 
themselves away in wanton schism. Some- 
times, that the different churches, separate 
in name and form, are united in substance 
and spirit, that their several pastors, co- 
operating in every good word and work, are 
really a presbytery or college of ministers 
for the one Church of Christ in the town. 
Sometimes it will appear that the Catholic 
Tract Society has become a sort of church 
without ordinances, and that the president 



270 FIVE THEORIES OF THE CHURCH. 

of the Society is actual bishop of the town. 
But more commonly the most that can be 
said is that the church in such a community 
is existing in a state of schism ; as, in the 
Rome of the twelfth and thirteenth centu- 
ries, the authority of the state might prop- 
erly be described as dispersed among a num- 
ber of families and factions. And the best 
that any one can do in such a case, is, while 
joining himself in special fellowship where 
he will lend himself least to the encourage- 
ment of faction, always to hold hie supreme 
allegiance to be due to the interests and au- 
thority of the whole family that is named of 
Christ. 

It is much in favor of any theory on such 
a subject as the one which we have in hand, 
that its chief difficulties lie in matters of 
application and detail. In these matters 
we would not speak with too much confi- 
dence. We may have wrought unsuccess- 
fully in developing and applying the analogy 
which is the theme of our article. But we 
reach the close of the discussion with in- 
creased confidence that in the just treatment 
of this analogy lies the only hope of solving 
the problems of ecclesiastical polity. 



THE RESTORATION OF THE PROT- 
ESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH TO 
CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP 



RESTORATION OF THE 

PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL 

CHURCH 

TO CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 



That man will deserve well of the theo- 
logical world who shall write, sympatheti- 
cally but critically, the hitherto unwritten 
history of the projects and tentatives of 
Christian union. To be complete, such a 
history would have to go very far back to- 
ward the apostolic age ; for the effort after 
union is doubtless nearly coeval with the 
tendency to schism ; only, in the spiritual 
system, it is a sorrowful fact that down to 
our time the centripetal force has seemed to 
be overbalanced by the centrifugal. But 
the most accessible part of the story, the 
most instructive and practically useful to 
the church of the present day, is that part 
which begins with the first rendings of the 
Lutheran Eeformation. The student who 
should enter upon this interesting task 
would be liable to some surprises at discov- 
ering how many and important are the facts 
and how considerable the literature pertain- 



274 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

ing to it. A better contribution to the 
cause of Christian union could hardly be 
made than by some such large review as we 
have suggested. 

The motives that have incited to Chris- 
tian union have been diverse and often 
mixed, and have taken a long range, from 
the highest downward. Sensitiveness for 
the honor of the church and high loyalty 
to its Head, love of the brethren, zeal for 
the more effective advancement of the king- 
dom of Cod— motives like these mingle or 
alternate throughout this curious history, 
with ambitions for a splendid and dominat- 
ing hierarchy and Babel-plans of spiritual 
despotism, with aspirations after sectarian 
aggrandizement, and even with ugly ani- 
mosities against one's fellow-Christians. 
Strange and abhorrent as the paradox may 
seem, it is a not infrequent thing in history 
to find plans of church union or federation 
springing from the spirit of schism, just as 
international alliances, offensive and defen- 
sive, are apt to be concluded when war is 
impending or intended. The holy sacra- 
ment of communion has been, in every age 
of church history, desecrated as the occasion 
of quarrel and mutual repulsion. From the 
beginning of them, the symbols of the Chris- 
tian faith have been studiously contrived as 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 275 

, 

ecbols for the " firing out" of certain Chris- 
tians.* It admits of doubt whether any 
form of confession or any plan of church 
union has ever been proposed without a dis- 
tinct recognition, either with regret or with 
glee, of the classes of Christians who were 
to be excluded by it. Plans of Christian 
union at their best and broadest have been 
plans for the union of almost all Christians, 
and generally plans purposely contrived for 
the exclusion of some Christians, or for ad- 
mitting them under severe exactions. 

It may justly be said of the basis of 
church union proposed by the bishops of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church in Eng- 
land and in the United States, that it is as 
respectable in its motive and its source, and 
as worthy in itself, as any of its predecessors. 
It is one of the happiest of many indica- 
tions of the great advance of that denomi- 
nation, especially in the United States, in 
every measurement of progress. In num- 
bers, in wealth and influence, in intellectual 
and spiritual power, in true evangelistic 
zeal, in courage against public wrongs, and 

* One of the earliest of these formulas was contrived by 
Bishop Cyprian with a phrase which, he flattered himself, 
would have the effect to keep the Novatians out of the church- 
men who had incurred his just disapproval for their attempt 
to keep certain other Christians out. See Epist Ixxvi, to 
Magnus. 



276 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

pre-eminently in the difficult work of city 
parishes, it has made such advances in the 
last fifty years as hardly any other sect of 
the American Church has made. And it 
has shown itself able to bear this prosperity. 
Gaining in real self-respect, it has learned 
respect for others. Less and less do we 
hear of a certain snobbish pride in maintain- 
ing an elegant exclusiveness toward its 
neighbors, joined with impressive allu- 
sions to its distinguished relations in foreign 
parts. The most reluctant gainsayer is 
forced to recognize the evidences of a re- 
vival of religion, in the highest sense of 
that phrase, pervading the whole body. 
And among these evidences of revival none 
is more divinely attested than this, " that 
they love the brethren. ' ' 

A most honorable and hopeful sign in the 
Episcopal Church of to-day is its ' ' sacred 
discontent" with its peculiarly isolated posi- 
tion. It may be said, indeed, with some 
justice, that this isolation in which it has 
stood so long, cut off on all sides from for- 
mal communion with fellow- Christians, has 
been by its own fault ; would it not be fair 
to recognize that its own virtue has had 
something to do with it ? If it has cut it- 
self quite loose from the church of the 
nineteenth century, has not this fact been 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 277 

incidental, or, rather, accidental, to a praise- 
worthy zeal for keeping up close relations 
with the church of the fourth century ? If 
it has seemed sometimes to neglect the ordi- 
nary courtesies toward its immediate neigh- 
bors, is not something to be pardoned to the 
assiduity with which it has sought, however 
unsuccessfully, for recognition and acts of 
fellowship in the ends of the earth ? Is it 
not proving itself a true vine, wholly a right 
seed, when, having so long reached its ten- 
drils toward the East and found nothing 
offered for it to cling to (except the Old 
Catholics, if there are any of them left), it 
begins to turn with some sincere yearnings of 
heart to those toward whom it has hitherto 
cultivated a certain aloofness of attitude ? 
It marks a dangerous stage in the process of 
freezing, when one loses the sensation of 
cold ; it is a symptom of the new and more 
vigorous life which is pulsating in the Prot- 
estant Episcopal organization, that the con- 
sciousness comes back to it of the chilliness 
of its practical separation from the Holy 
Catholic Church, the communion of saints. 
The dominating motive and spirit of the 
Protestant bishops in proposing " Articles 
of Church Unity" seems wholly right, hon- 
orable, and Christian. 

This being so, there is no good reason for 



278 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

being captious about the manner of it. If 
it seems to any to have, as enunciated at 
Chicago, the air of an invitation to the 
mountain to come to Mohammed, it is well 
to remember that at Lambeth it had much 
less of that appearance. If it shows itself 
a little diplomatic in scrupling some cus- 
tomary terms of courtesy, we are bound to 
consider the extent to which the body is em- 
barrassed, in this matter, by its antecedents, 
and to honor the contrast which it now 
presents to the studiously supercilious and 
insolent style characteristic of its bad old 
days. 

We come now to the substance of the pro- 
posed fourfold basis of unity, which is, 
in brief, the two Testaments, the two creeds, 
the two sacraments, and the Historic Epis- 
copate. 

On this, we remark at the outset, that in 
point of comprehensiveness it is far in ad- 
vance of other projects of its class. On this 
account it cannot hope for the approval of 
those whose chief satisfaction with any plan 
of union or communion is measured by the 
good people that it keeps out. To such, 
the fact that this plan extends hospitable 
invitation to all heresies of later date than 
the fourth century is inadequately compen- 
sated by the fact that it sternly excludes 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 279 

such modern saints as Buckminster and 
Channing and Henry Ware and James 
Martineau, and such as Joseph John Gfur- 
ney and Elizabeth Fry. The exclusion is 
a serious one ; but, after all, it is doubtful 
whether any project of Christian union has 
been set forth which leaves so few of the 
blessed saints in the outer darkness. 

Aside from these exceptions, it will not 
be denied that the various sects of American 
Christians are as well agreed with each other 
on the first three ' ' articles of church 
unity," the two Testaments, the two creeds 
and the two sacraments, as the Protestant 
Episcopalians are agreed among themselves. 
Of course, the good bishops themselves do 
not mean just what they say when they 
speak of ' * the Mcene Creed as the sufficient 
statement of the Christian faith." It is 
doubtless sufficient and more than sufficient 
for some purposes, and insufficient for some 
other purposes ; otherwise they would not 
keep on printing the Thirty-nine Articles. 
Nevertheless, as we have said, there would 
be no difficulty about these three articles. 
They are agreed upon in advance. 

It appears, then, by this process of elimi- 
nation, that there is only one condition lack- 
ing to enable the Protestant Episcopalians 
to come into that fellowship with their fel- 



280 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

low-Protestants which their souls long for. 
This sole condition, in the language of the 
bishops, is this : " The historic episcopate, 
locally adapted in the methods of its admin- 
istration to the varying needs of the nations 
and peoples called of God into the unity of 
His Church." Surely the partition walls 
are worn thin, when this is all that remains 
to separate. There is nothing hopeless, at 
the present day, about this condition. The 
situation is very different now from what it 
was in those fierce old fighting days when 
Independency and Presbyterianism were as- 
serting each its jus divinum, and denounc- 
ing black Prelacy as a Man of Sin and an 
infringement of the Second Commandment ; 
and when the more or less judicious Hooker 
in his Polity, and the mild Stillingfleet 
in his emollient " Weapon-salve for the 
Church's Wounds," were meekly pleading 
for the right of bishops to exist. Nowhere 
except in corners of Scotland and in some 
of the transplanted Scotch sects is it easy 
to imagine the old style of narrow anti-prel- 
acy as prevailing at the present day. The 
narrow exclusiveness in this dispute has 
completely passed over to the other side. 
There need be no despair of a general con- 
sent to the " Historic Episcopate." But it 
would be needful to indicate more distinctly 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 281 

what is meant by the phrase, and what sort 
of consent to it was called for. 

What is meant by ' ' the Historic Episco- 
pate" ? According to an old-fashioned 
theory still current among Roman Catholic 
scholars, the original form of the episco- 
pate was the college of the twelve apostles, 
having a jurisdiction at large over all 
churches. This ideal is represented in our 
time by the powerful organization of the 
Methodist episcopate. Probably this is not 
the historic episcopate to which our consent 
or conformity is desired. 

Beyond all question, the primitive epis- 
copate, dating from the time when the form 
of church organization becomes distinctly a 
matter of history, was an oppidan episco- 
pate, giving a bishop to every town, the 
president of the town clergy. This is the 
primitive type of the bishop of the sub-apos- 
tolic age. As we depart in time and dis- 
tance from the early centres of evangeliza- 
tion, we find ourselves departing from this 
type of organization. It is to this model of 
episcopacy that it would be most reasonable, 
most hopeful, and most practically useful, 
to seek the consent of American Christians 
in general. That great scholar and repre- 
sentative Puritan, the late President Wool- 
sey, remarked in conversation, " I would be 



282 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

in favor of an oppidan episcopacy." But, 
curiously enough, the persons most devoted 
at once to the historic episcopate and to the 
primitive Church are just those who would 
be most sorely discontented and recalcitrant 
at the acceptance of their " article of unity" 
on this basis so unmistakably historical and 
so undeniably primitive. 

Coming down from the early ages and 
lands of the Church, we arrive, in the 
course of the iron ages of Christianity, at a 
gradual but revolutionary change in the 
office and function of bishop. His jurisdic- 
tion has widened out beyond the limits of 
the town and its outlying hamlets, and 
taken on the dimensions of a kingdom, in- 
cluding great and distant cities and teeming 
populations. There is a sense, no doubt, 
in which these novel functionaries, bearing 
the old name, may be said to belong to 
" the historic episcopate locally adapted," 
etc. But it is (to borrow a phrase from 
Oxford) a non-natural sense. 

Another departure from the primitive 
and historic model has resulted, in the 
American Protestant Episcopal Church, 
from the exigency, so naively confessed in 
the preface of its Book of Common Prayer, 
of organizing itself as a sect over against 
other sects. This consists in the overslaugh- 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 283 

ing of the proper authority of the bishop in 
his own diocese by the exorbitant powers of a 
periodical synod that stretches its jurisdic- 
tion over a continent, and assumes to con- 
trol the bishop in his diocese in the detail 
of matters confessedly local and variable. 
Doubtless to have a sect organized for more 
or less friendly competition with other sects, 
this wide divergence from the ancient and 
catholic order may have seemed necessary. 
But if necessary, it is a necessary evil. This 
sectarian organization — the national consoli- 
dation of congregations of a certain way of 
thinking — is mightily helpful to a sectarian 
propaganda, but it is inevitably a copious 
source of local schisms. And yet it is much 
to be feared that this hurtful modern per- 
version of the ancient order is just what 
our good brethren at Chicago mean by " the 
historic episcopate locally adapted." 

There is yet another form of ' ' the episco- 
pate adapted" which it is quite certain that 
there was no intention either at Lambeth or 
at Chicago to commend to the Christian 
public as a basis of union, but which, if 
only for completeness of statement, ought 
at least to be mentioned here ; we refer of 
course to that modification — quite in the 
line of the others which we have considered 
— which organizes the episcopate under a 



284 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

primatial see, and which has lately been 
urged upon us as a basis of union by a highly 
respected and venerated clergyman occupy- 
ing a position of great dignity at the city of 
Kome. It might perhaps have been sup- 
posed that this proposal would fall in with 
the liberal ideas of " adaptation" entertained 
by the bishops at Lambeth, opening a way 
toward that larger fellowship to which they 
aspire. But from some remarks on the 
subject from the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
we conclude that in the matter of " adapt- 
ing the historic episcopate" he draws the 
line just at that point. And a very happy 
circumstance it was for his Grace that he 
happened to take this view of the case, 
thereby avoiding all risk of the penalties of 
praemunire. 

Evidently we can hope for no progress 
toward Christian union on this basis of 
"the historical episcopate adapted," until 
we come to a little more distinct understand- 
ing of what is meant by the phrase. 

There is yet another point, of not less 
practical importance, that requires explana- 
tion. Of what sort, in the mind of the 
proposers, is to be the application of their 
condition of church unity ? It seems to be 
intended to require assent or consent of 
some kind. Is it their idea to demand as- 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 285 

sent to their theory of church polity ? But 
they have no theory. It would be impossi- 
ble to frame in language a theory of church 
order on which they would be agreed among 
themselves. It must be safe for us to pre- 
sume that they mean to exact nothing more 
in the way of assent than is required in their 
own ordinal ; and that, according to our 
recollection, is the easiest possible. There 
is no difficulty just here. That man must 
be a hopeless sectarian indeed who cannot 
find a sense in which he can assent to " the 
historic episcopate, " in the writings of such 
distinguished Anglican ecclesiastics as (for 
instance) Archbishop Whately and Bishop 
Lightfoot, and Deans Alford and Stanley, 
and Dr. Hatch. 

But here comes a more embarrassing 
question : To whom is this conditional 
proffer of Christian fellowship tendered ? 
Is it to individuals ? Let us hope so, for in 
this case difficulties of the gravest sort are 
avoided, and a door of hope is opened to 
the Episcopal Church in America in the 
direction of a more catholic communion. 
(We say " in America/' for it is only here 
that the question is a practical one. It is 
very pleasant to read the fraternal expres- 
sions of English bishops, but really they 
have about as little control over the matter 



286 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

as a convention of sextons would have. 
With them it is a matter for Parliament, 
and especially for that somewhat mixed 
body, the House of Commons, whose su- 
premacy in such matters is an " adaptation 
of the historic episcopate 5 ' which we hope 
will not be too strenuously insisted on. 
The utterances of the American bishops are 
of more importance. They have not indeed 
authority over the matter, and there is room 
for painful doubt whether they could ' ' carry 
their constituencies " in favor of measures 
to give practical effect to their sentiments. 
But they have at least votes and a share of 
power, and weighty and well -deserved influ- 
ence.) 

To return from this long parenthesis : if 
these overtures and conditions of fellowship 
are tendered to Christians and Christian 
ministers as individuals, the way is open at 
once for accepting them. TVe will under- 
take, if allowed a brief time for correspond- 
ence, to find and present to any one of the 
bishops who voted at Chicago, a company 
of godly and well-learned men, approved 
and honored as faithful ministers of the 
Gospel, and undeniably conformed to the 
four prescribed conditions, who will gladly 
accept the fellowship of the bishops in the 
same sincere and brotherly spirit in which 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 287 

it is proffered. What is the sort of hos- 
pitality to which they will find themselves 
welcomed ? First, they will be put in 
quarantine for twelve months, during which 
they will be interdicted from all the duties 
and privileges of the Christian ministry. 
This being passed, they will be admissible 
to the narrowly circumscribed fellowship of 
the bishops and their clergy, on condition 
of severing themselves by permanent and 
irretrievable schism from the general com- 
munion of American churches and minis- 
ters. Still another condition besides the 
four named at Lambeth and Chicago they 
will find to be rigorously exacted, to wit, 
that they shall conduct the offices of public 
worship always in conformity to an ancient 
Act of the English Parliament (1 Edw. vi.), 
which seems to be looked upon as univer- 
sally and divinely obligatory upon American 
Christians ; and that they shall refuse to do 
the duty of preachers of the Gospel to con- 
gregations worshipping by a different rite. 

If, writing without opportunity of recon- 
sulting the canons that cover the case, we 
have made any important mistake as to the 
course prescribed, we shall gladly accept 
corrections. If, on the other hand, our 
statement is substantially correct, in what 
sort of light does it leave the Lambeth-Chi- 



288 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

cago overtures for Church unity ? We are 
confident that those overtures were offered 
with a genuine sentimental sincerity ; but 
practically what better are they than a 
plausible and not very ingenuous bid for 
proselytes ? 

The answer to all these difficulties must 
needs be that the four " Lambeth articles" 
(to use an old phrase in its new application) 
are not intended to apply to individuals, 
but are only offered as a basis of negotiation 
with other sects or "religious bodies." 
The statement confronts us with difficulties 
still more formidable. The former difficul- 
ties could be removed by the amendment of 
a few arbitrary canons. We now meet with 
difficulties that are deeper seated. 

Waiving the very great but not desperate 
difficulties of opening and conducting nego- 
tiations and then of securing the ratification 
of them on the part of both the high con- 
tracting parties — supposing these, by the 
grace of God, brought to a successful issue, 
and terms of union or confederation agreed 
on with the leading " religious bodies'' on 
the basis of the historic episcopate — what 
then ? Why, then, doubtless, with the nec- 
essary modifications of its canons (which can 
just as well be modified without such diplo- 
macy as with it), the Protestant Episcopal 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 289 

Church would be let out from its seclusion 
— a most happy and desirable event. But 
would the common historic episcopate thus 
conferred have so much as a tendency to 
promote the unity of the church ? Would 
it not tend rather to the sanctioning, the 
confirming, and the exasperating of schism ? 
Let us look soberly into these questions. 

Two plans have been suggested for the 
uniting of the church on the basis of the 
episcopate. One is that the ' ' religious 
bodies" should be consolidated under one 
government in which all should be repre- 
sented, and in which each should have full 
liberty within the easy limits of " the quad- 
rilateral.' ' The other is, that without at- 
tempting governmental consolidation, there 
should be communicated to representatives 
of each of the " religious bodies'' that which 
constitutes the essential historicity of the 
episcopate. If there is a tertium quid to 
this alternative we are not informed of it. 
The first course would give us a huge cor- 
poration, the constituent members of which 
would be, not " faithful men," but organ- 
ized and embattled sects trained and drilled 
through ages of schism to the practice of 
competition and emulation and other 
" works of the flesh." The second course 
would give us just what we have now — this 



290 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

scandal of scrambling, hustling, and com- 
peting sects, holding nevertheless quite sin- 
cerely certain terms of fraternal fellowship 
with each other — with only this difference, 
that thenceforth the Protestant Episco- 
palians, perhaps the most shamelessly 
scrambling and hustling ' ' religious body" 
of the lot, would feel itself at liberty, with- 
out sacrifice of its dignity and consistency, 
to fraternize along with the rest. 

Is it possible that any have been dreaming 
that the historic episcopate would change 
the elements of human nature ? Happily 
we are not left without experimental proofs 
on this point, and these nigh at hand. Our 
brethren of "the Roman obedience" have 
an historic episcopate — very historic indeed, 
as well as in a high degree " locally adapt- 
ed" — but it seems to have had no effect 
whatever in bringing them into exception- 
ally fraternal relations with their historically 
episcopal neighbors ; in fact, the effect of 
it, as far as visible, seems exactly the re- 
verse. A case quite in point is that of the 
Moravian Church — name never to be men- 
tioned without love and veneration — which 
was in occupation here with its bishops forty 
years before the Episcopalians, and whose 
historic episcopacy is certified by the highest 
authority in the English Church, an Act of 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 291 

Parliament ; but what token of favor or fel- 
lowship has it ever had from the Protestant 
Episcopal Church ? So far as we are aware, 
only this : that the amiable Bishop Stevens 
was kind enough to reordain a Moravian 
presbyter in order to give him " a more 
ample ordination ;" and this is an amplifi- 
cation that any of us might have had on the 
same terms. There is still another case, 
which can hardly have occurred to the minds 
of the bishops at Chicago when they were 
yearning for union with their Protestant 
brethren on the basis of the two Testa- 
ments, the two Creeds, the two Sacraments, 
and the Historic Episcopate. Close at hand 
was the very object of their hearts' desire. 
And yet we do not remember to have read, 
in any account of their meeting, of their 
having sent a special message to the Right 
Reverend Bishop Cheney and his presby- 
ters, and of his being received by them with 
embraces and effusive expressions of frater- 
nal delight. It may have happened, but we 
have seen no record of it. We are not ques- 
tioning in the slightest the personal respect 
and affection with which this eminent and 
excellent partner of theirs in the historic 
episcopate is regarded by them in their 
hearts. But so far as strictly ecclesiastical 
fellowship is concerned, we have seen no 



292 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

evidence that the Reformed Episcopal 
Church, for all its Testaments, Creeds, 
Sacraments, and Episcopate, comes any 
nearer to satisfying the longings of the 
bishops for union with somebody, some- 
where, than the " religious bodies'' that are 
less distinctly conformed to the four condi- 
tions. In fact, all indications are directly to 
the contrary. By reason of the closeness of 
its filial likeness, the Reformed Episcopal 
Church is a less eligible object of fellowship 
than we who are afar off. In the language 
of the poet Gilbert, it is " too, too ail-but. " 
We cannot resist the conviction that the 
bishops at Chicago, good, honest brethren 
speaking out of the sincerity of their hearts, 
nevertheless do not know their own minds 
in this matter. If there is any instruction 
in their own history and in Church history 
generally, the more nearly any one of the 
other " religious bodies" is approximated to 
them, the more unwilling they would be to 
have fraternal relations with it. 

Let us prognosticate a little. Suppose ne- 
gotiations on the " quadrilateral" basis to 
have been successfully concluded by which the 
two leading bodies of Presbyterians, North 
and South (about 7000 ministers and 1,000,- 
000 communicants), and of Methodists, 
North and South (about 20,000 ministers 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 293 

and 3,500,000 communicants), should be 
united with the Protestant Episcopal 
Church (about 4000 ministers and 500,000 
communicants) ; the resultant either will 
be a governmental consolidation or it will 
not be. If the former, will any imagina- 
tion venture to forecast the course of debate 
and business in the first General Synod or 
Council of the new Church, when (for in- 
stance) the question arises whether the Kev- 
erend Dr. Briggs is taken in or left outside 
by the first of the four conditions of union ? 
If the latter, in what respect is the inter- 
communion among the sects confederating 
on the quadrilateral basis, of any greater 
efficacy for good than the intercommunion 
already existing among what are called the 
evangelical denominations, except that the 
new arrangement will take in the Episco- 
palians ? The existing intercommunion, on 
the basis of common, faith and hope and 
genuine though imperfect mutual love and 
respect, does not suffice to save the country, 
and especially the West, from wasteful and 
scandalous competitions. Is there the ghost 
of a reason for thinking that by adding to 
this basis the common claim to a historic 
episcopate the practical mischiefs of schism 
would be one whit diminished ? 

It is not even probable that the desired 



294 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

union would diminish the number of sects. 
The King of Prussia had two Protestant 
sects in his dominion ; he was resolved to 
have only one ; when he had got through 
with his work he found that he had three. 
The Roman missionaries in the East mourn- 
ed over the division of Eastern Christians ; 
they labored strenuously to draw all to- 
gether on a basis not wholly unlike the 
" quadrilateral ;" they succeeded so well 
that at last they had nearly twice as many 
sects as there were to begin with, with the 
Latin sect to boot. Is there any practical 
lesson in these bits of history ? 

If we may imagine the proposed unifica- 
tion to go on so near to achievement as that 
the number of sects in our American Chris- 
tendom should be reduced to two, we should 
then be farther from our end than before, 
by as much as that the intensity and acri- 
mony of sectarian animosity would then be 
raised to its highest power. 

We cannot regard the present critical 
position of the Protestant Episcopal com- 
munion in relation to church union, amia- 
ble and praiseworthy as it is, without some- 
thing of anxiety lest the general interests of 
the One Church suffer detriment. It would 
be a serious loss to the true cause of Chris- 
tian unity if, through the impatience of 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 295 

Episcopalians with an irksome isolation, the 
Church of America should lose the benefit 
of their unwelcome but salutary protest 
against the sin of schism. Almost all the 
other Protestant sects have lapsed into the 
habit of regarding schism as the right and 
normal order of the church. We all recog- 
nize the common strain of talk at Evangeli- 
cal Alliance meetings and like occasions, 
how that the separate sects (we beg pardon — 
denominations) are ordered by Divine wis- 
dom, and the more of them the better ; how 
that the prismatic colors blend into the 
white light ; how that the horse, the foot, 
the artillery, and the sharpshooters combine 
to make up the sacramental host ; how com- 
petition is the life of business and emulation 
one of the works of the Spirit ; but never- 
theless how beautiful it is, like the oint- 
ment upon the head of Aaron, for brethren 
to dwell together in unity now and then 
for an hour at a Tract Society meeting 
or an Evangelical Alliance ! In the midst of 
this general defection from the foundation 
principles of the church, it has been a 
wholesome thing for us to be forced to listen 
to the persistent, uncompromising protest 
against all this cant, from one of the minor 
sects. The fidelity with which this protest has 
been reiterated in men's reluctant ears may 



296 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

well be called heroic. Against affectionate 
entreaties, against angry denunciations of 
bigotry, and narrowness, and Pharisaism, the 
little party of High Church Episcopalians, 
itself the merest sect of a sect, has answered 
all invitations from its " sister churches" 
with stout denials: "you are not sister 
churches, you are only sects ; there is only 
one Church, and we are it ; sects have no 
right to exist. You ought, all of you, to 
come into the Church, the ark of safety, in- 
stead of lingering without, having no hope 
except in the uncovenanted mercies ; espe- 
cially you who are assuming to act as min- 
isters of these religious bodies, you are in- 
volved in the guilt of Korah, and Dathan, 
and Abiram ; if you wish our fellowship in 
the ministry, you must be admitted to it in 
the only way — through ordination by the 
historic episcopate, of which we hold the 
monopoly." Not only against denuncia- 
tion and entreaty has this protest asserted 
itself, but (what is harder to bear) against 
the frequent smile and the occasional laugh. 
For it is impossible to deny that the situa- 
tion has sometimes been extremely funny. 
But it has been bravely persisted in never- 
theless — all the more honor to the conscien- 
tious illogical brethren who so stuck to 
their principles without seeing the humor- 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 297 

ous aspects or the moral consequences of 
them. 

It is a matter of serious anxiety to ob- 
serve, with the vigorous growth of ' ' Broad" 
principles, a weakening of this sturdy and 
long-sustained protest, and a disposition (as 
in this " quadrilateral" manifesto) to fall 
into the easy, popular course of compromise 
with sectarianism. The hope of church 
unity does not lie that way. Negotiation 
among sects as such can lead to nothing 
higher than a union among sects as such, 
and a union of sects as such never can be 
the Church. A confederation of sects wears 
no seamless robe ; its proper drapery is a 
crazy-quilt. 

We are reluctant to let go the long-cher- 
ished hope that some time a logical mind 
would be raised up in the High Church 
party among the Episcopalians who should 
show his brethren what their position im- 
plies. This party, which has long been 
completely dominant in that " religious 
body," has never really taken itself serious- 
ly. Otherwise it could not have helped see- 
ing that by ' ' High" principles it was bound 
in conscience to the broadest of broad poli- 
cies. It has claimed for its communion, 
' ' this is not a sect, or a denomination, this 
is the Holy Catholic Church for America. 



298 PK9TESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

This is the one channel of sacramental 
grace, outside of which are no covenanted 
mercies. This alone can confer that au- 
thority without which the assumption of 
the duties of the Christian ministry is an 
awful sacrilege. This is the one ark of 
safety/' But instead of feeling the mo- 
mentous responsibility of such a trust, and 
flinging wide the happy gates of Gospel 
grace, and offering welcome to all believers, 
it has planted itself across the gang-plank 
of the ark and forbidden entrance to all but 
those who conformed to a confessedly arbi- 
trary system of rules of etiquette. Its com- 
munion claims to be the Church Catholic ; 
but is ' ' run" in the spirit of the narrowest 
and most sectarian of sects. Liberal enough 
where narrowness might have been excusable, 
solemnly strict at points at which it was 
bound by its confessed principles to be free- 
handed and comprehensive, it would seem 
to have taken for its government an ancient 
and most catholic maxim, "locally adapt- 
ed" to its own temper and convenience : 
in necessariis libertas ; in non-necessariis 
unitas. 

If that should come to pass which seems 
indicated by the signs of the times, and the 
High Church party in the Episcopal Church, 
having had everything its own way for so 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 299 

long, should be superseded in its dominant 
position by the young and able and rapidly 
growing Broad Church party, we should 
feel that while something had been gained 
by the change, a valuable opportunity had 
been missed and wasted, and a door of hope 
for the peace and unity of the Church of 
America had been shut fast. We venture to 
repeat here language that was written just 
twenty-one years ago on the occasion of Dr. 
Dollinger's forgotten little Christian Union 
convention at Bonn : 

The hopeful way out of the practical difficulties 
of schism, especially in America, is not that of 
diplomacy among doctors of divinity of various 
sects, but that which begins at the other end, with 
seeking a way of reconciling local sectarian divi- 
sions in little villages. I believe that the Episco- 
pal Church in America, if it only knew its mis- 
sion, has some grand advantages for this work. 
If it could rid itself of sundry canons that bind it 
hand and foot, abate a little of that high-and- 
mighty tone which is so apt to make people smile, 
and apply to such a ministry of reconciliation one 
half of the energy now expended in fomenting 
local schisms at home and in begging for recogni- 
tion and Christian union at the ends of the earth, 
it might do a great thing for itself, and a greater 
thing for American Christianity, and make all 
other Christian communions grateful to it in spite 
of themselves. 

Jerusalem, if thou hadst known ! 



300 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

We commend to the bishops who spoke 
at Lambeth and at Chicago, and to the 
" religions bodies" who may be attracted 
by their proposals, the study of the system, 
and methods, and traditions of the Soman 
Catholic Church. There are greater and 
better things to be studied in that venerable 
institution than those matters of pomp and 
pageant and millinery that engage the at- 
tention of petty minds. There is its sense 
of duty and responsibility and its scale of 
missionary endeavor, not wholly out of pro- 
portion to the magnificence of its preten- 
sions. There is its elasticity in adapting it- 
self " to the varying needs of the nations 
and peoples" of which we see a signal and 
admirable illustration before us in the United 
States at this very time. There is its dis- 
tinction, clearly recognized, if not always 
justly drawn, between the variable things 
and the constant things in Christianity. 
And withal (a matter which the popular 
impressions completely misconceive) there is 
its faculty, of which Anglicanism has shown 
a characteristic insular and John-Bullish 
incapacity, of comprehending within the 
harmony of a single system diverse races, 
languages, rites, disciplines, theologies, and 
temperaments. It does not insist that the 
Eastern nations shall learn the Latin Ian- 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 301 

guage or adopt the Koman rite. It per- 
mits among them a married clergy, and 
holds itself free at its discretion to introduce 
the same liberty among the Western na- 
tions. It admits (though it tries to discour- 
age them) traditional variations of ritual 
" use" in individual dioceses. But espe- 
cially it admits diverse and sharply contro- 
versial schools of doctrinal theology, main- 
taining each its separate missions and its 
separate congregations, and cultivating each 
its favorite specialties in religious work, in- 
citing each other with a perilous intensity 
of emulation and even envy, and, strangest 
of all, keeping up each its own discipline, 
independent of the authority of the episco- 
pate. In short, that which in Protestant- 
ism would be a schism, tearing itself from 
the Church with ruthless rending, and or- 
ganizing itself into a sect of aggravated and 
acrimonious temper, under the masterly 
statesmanship of the Koman polity is geared 
into its complex machinery and becomes an 
Order in the Church.* Is there in all this 



* We would like to be informed by any who are skilled in 
the literature, of the subject, whether the striking analogy 
between the sects in the fellowship of Protestantism, and the 
Orders in the unity of the Roman Church, has ever been 
brought out in its instructive details. Protestantism, as well 
as the Catholic Church, has its Benedictines, its Dominicans, 
its Jesuits, and its Capuchins, to say nothing of other mendi- 



302 PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

no instruction and warning to be laid to 
heart by an institution that is in danger of 

cant orders. It may justly be claimed, on the one hand, that 
under the visible divisions of Protestantism there is an un- 
derlying unity ; as on the other hand it would have to be con- 
ceded that under the formal union of the Orders under the 
obedience of the Holy See, there have sometimes raged the 
fiercest passions of sectarian hatred. The story of the mutual 
animosities of the different Orders of missionaries in China 
could not easily be paralleled from the history of the Protes- 
tant sects. But all things considered, it is wonderful and ad- 
mirable how little there is, or, at least, how little there is 
known, of violent discord or mischievous competition in so 
complicated and risky an organization as the organization of 
the regular Orders inside the lines of the secular hierarchy, 
but independent of its authority. 

ETery one will recall the strong antitheses of Macaulay in 
contrasting the comprehensiveness of the Roman Church 
with the martinet rigidity of the English. "At Rome, the 
Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the Calendar as 
St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be foundress and first Superior 
of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the Gaols. Place Ignatius 
Loyola at Oxford, He is certain to become the head of a for- 
midable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is cer- 
tain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the 
interests and honor of the Church."' We are aware that the 
author quoted is not a favorite in the American Episcopal 
Church ; but for all that, this passage from the review of 
Ranke contains •'wholesome doctrine" for it " and suited to 
these times." 

Of course the likeness between the Orders of the Roman 
Church and the sects of Protestantism does not extend to 
all points. The division between the Orders goes no further 
down than the clergy ; the layman is neither Dominican nor 
Franciscan, but simply Catholic. Among Protestants the par- 
titions cut down to the lowest strata of the people. In like 
manner in the other direction, at Rome, the division extends 
upward as far as the General of the Order, but is limited by 
the paramount authority of the Yicar of Christ ; among Prot- 
estants the division extends on and up, limited only by the 
paramount authority of Christ himself, when this authority is 
able to get a hearing for itself. 



AND CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP. 303 

combining lofty pretensions to the ex- 
clusive authority and communion of the 
Catholic Church with the narrowness and 
light-minded irresponsibility of a Protestant 
sect ? The Lambeth and Chicago mani- 
festo seems to betoken that the leaders of 
Anglicanism have begun to get a glimpse 
of their false position. Unhappily it seems 
also to indicate that they are ready to fall 
into a new position no less false than the 
old. 



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